The Epistle of David

Movie Review: Into Great Silence

2012-01-07T15:27:00.002-06:00

But--if you cannot give us ease--

Last of the race of them who grieve

Here leave us to die out with these

Last of the people who believe!

Silent, while the years engrave the brow;

Silent--the best are silent now.

-Matthew Arnold, "Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse"

Into Great Silence is an experience of monkish life at the Grande Chartreuse monastery high in the French Alps. This is not an easy film for contemporary people to watch because, true to its name, it is mostly a silent film. There is little to no dialogue and what plot there is must be supplied by the viewer. Indeed, the filmmaker added no music and used no artificial light in the film. What you see is what you get, in a sparse and importantly rhetorical way. The film is as stripped down as the lives of the monks, but it manages to capture the appeal of leaving behind what is no longer needed and embracing the grace and beauty that already surrounds you. For more on the filmmaker, Philip Gröning, see this excellent review.

Indeed, the opening sequences are so full of silence and stillness that it was almost painful. Although Kathy and I both sat down to watch it, only I was able to finish it, and that at some considerable exertion of will power. Of course, that may not sound like a recommendation, but I'm really glad I watched this film. It is both contemplative and sobering, still and silent in some deep way that most of contemporary life is no longer capable of recreating. In fact, I was struck by the depth of the religious commitment possessed by these men and I realized how little faith I have and how little discipline and how little consciousness of beauty.

Most of the time the monks are filmed in their rooms, reading, studying, praying. One gathers from the film that their whole life passes between reading, eating, studying, praying, and working. This doesn't sound so bad, when you put it like that. Interspersed toward the end of the film are shots of the monks standing quietly in front of the camera. What is striking is how young their eyes look in these shots - much younger than most of the eyes encountered these days in contemporary settings.

The best scene of the film is a few minutes of the monks sledding down a freshly snow-covered mountain. The effect of the silence of the monks' lives is reinforced by the fact that all of the sounds experienced there are strikingly natural. It is a world where tools make noise, but not machines. Rain dropping on the roof. Wind blowing. The stream rolling down the mountain. A monk chopping wood. A monk gardening. And so on. The only artificial sound in the whole film, really, is the ringing of a church bell, but somehow it feels like such a natural and fitting sound for the landscape and the architecture. The sounds fit the place and they seem to break up the silence just perfectly.

The simplicity of their lives is astounding and the depth of their spiritual life in solitude and contemplation is inspiring. It really makes you wonder how little you could get by on. Maybe a wood burning stove, a couple of books, a chair, a table, and a bed. And work. Of course, there doesn't seem to be much in the way of family life and women are completely absent in the film, which for me, ultimately means I could never choose this monkish existence. However, it led me to question Hume's assertion that the monkish virtues are more vice than virtue. His claim is that the active life is better than the life of contemplation and solitude. Of course, contemplation and solitude is what we have too little of in this world of ours, and this film reminds the viewer that choosing to live without these virtues is at best to lose something essential in the human experience.

The final scenes of the film are an interview of sorts with a blind monk who talks about the emptiness of modern life and reinforces the grace and gratitude that should prevail in the human experience, gratitude to God for the beauty of the earth and the simple life. One of the best moments in the film comes earlier. The image on the screen is that of an old cloister hallway with sunlight streaming in. One of the monks is speaking to their weekly sabbath gathering:

Consider the analogy of the sunbeam:

Whoever feels its kindly light rejoices

as if the sun existed for him alone,

yet it illuminates land and sea

and is master of the atmosphere.

In the same way,

the spirit is given to each one

who receives him

as if he were the possession

of that person alone.

Christmas Sermon, 2011

2012-01-07T15:14:00.002-06:00

Good morning Brothers and Sisters. Merry Christmas!

Christmas is truly a wonderful time of year. It comes, of course, in a time of darkness. This time of year, especially in Minnesota, we wake up and it’s dark outside. Many of us leave for work or school in the dark and return home again in the evening – again in the dark. Christmas is a celebration of light in a time of darkness. Christmas is a celebration of life in a time of death. Christmas is a reminder that God is not dead nor doth he sleep!

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.

For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved. (John 3:16-17)

Christmas is a celebration of the coming of the Son of God. “God has come among us. He will come again. We remember and rejoice” (Faulconer). The coming of Christ into the world means that each of us can be saved from the darkness, sin, and death of this world. The coming of Christ, which we celebrate at Christmas, means that each of us can be redeemed from the fall of man – the fall that brought darkness into every one of our lives in the form our eventual death and the separation of our spirit from the Father.

The scriptures are full of prophecies about the coming of Christ into the world. Prophets from Adam and Alma to Zenos and Zenock, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Lehi, Nephi, and Jacob – all these testified that Christ would come into the world and save all mankind who believe on Him.

This morning I would like to call your attention to two prophecies of the coming of Christ, both made by women, both recorded in the first chapter of Luke.

It is there we hear the story of the angel Gabriel visiting Zacharias and Mary, announcing the coming of two babies: John the Baptist – an Elias, cousin and forerunner to the other baby, JESUS.

After the Anunciation, Mary

. . . Arose in those days, and went into the hill country with haste, into a city of Juda;

And entered into the house of Zacharias, and saluted Elisabeth [the mother of John the Baptist].

And it came to pass, that, when Elisabeth heard the salutation of Mary, the babe leaped in her womb; and Elisabeth was filled with the Holy Ghost:

And she spake out with a loud voice, and said, Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb.

And whence is this to me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me?

For lo, as soon as the voice of thy salutation sounded in mine ears, the babe leaped in my womb for joy.

And blessed is she that believed: for there shall be a performance of those things which were told her from the Lord. (Luke 1:39-45).

I want to pause on the image of John the Baptist leaping in the womb for joy! At the sound of the voice of Mother Mary, the baby heard and rejoiced. We too must rejoice when we hear the news of Christ’s coming.

As Jim Faulconer has written:

For some of us the joy of those good tidings came in a flash, sometimes a moment of surprise, sometimes a moment long hoped and prayed for. For others the light of Bethlehem’s star came into our lives gradually, growing almost unnoticed, but no less real. Others still wait to hear the angel’s voice and see the promised star, hoping and remembering Bethlehem in that hope to hear its tidings for themselves. The voice of the angel, of Mary, and Elisabeth is unto all!

The angel’s tidings, like the voice of God, are that God himself, the Creator of the world, has become one of us. He is not far away. He is not absolutely other than us, inaccessible to our pains and fears. He came into the world as we do, a helpless creature of flesh. He left it in death as we do, failing flesh. The Light of the World, its Beginning and End, has come and will come. He is with us, and being with us he would save us from sin.

Directly following the leap of the baby who would become John the Baptist we hear the voice of Mary:

My soul doth magnify the Lord,

And my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour.

For he hath regarded the low estate of his handmaiden: for, behold, from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed.

For he that is mighty hath done to me great things; and holy is his name.

And his mercy is on them that fear him from generation to generation.

He hath shewed strength with his arm; he hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts

He hath put down the mighty from their seats, and exalted them of low degree.

He hath filled the hungry with good things; and the rich he hath sent empty away.

He hath holpen his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy;

As he spake to our fathers, to Abraham, and to his seed for ever. (Luke 1: 46-55)

The coming of Christ into the world was like the coming of no other King. As Mary said, the might of this King was his mercy. Instead of gathering the proud and exalting the rich and powerful, this King brought a new kind of community, a community and church of charity. This community exalted them of low degree, put down the mighty from their seats, and scattered the proud, filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich empty away.

“The coming of the Lord’s justice and succor is so sure that Mary’s psalm speaks of it as if it had already happened: God recognizes those whom we do not, and they praise him for the good things he does for them.” (Jim Faulconer)

The message is for all of us. The coming of Christ into the world is for all of us. The invitation is for us to REPENT AND REJOICE!

Today we celebrate the first coming of Christ into the world. This coming was attended by angels, shepherds, wise men from the east, all of whom testified that a Savior was born into the world. Now we await a second coming of our Savior into the world, a coming just as glorious and powerful as His birth in Bethlehem over two thousand years ago.

Jesus, once of humble birth,

Now in glory comes to earth.

Once he suffered grief and pain,

Now he comes on earth to reign.

Once a meek and lowly Lamb,

Now the Lord, the Great I Am.

Once upon the cross he bowed;

Now his chariot is the cloud.

God has come among us. He will come again. Today we celebrate His first coming. Tomorrow we will welcome Him when He comes again – like a thief in the night. In the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.

Durham Cathedral

2011-10-20T19:38:00.005-05:00

Prisoners of Literacy

2011-03-02T23:11:00.002-06:00

For the last five hundred years we have been reading more and more - publishing more and more. Both of these developments have had an immeasurably profound effect on our politics, religion, technology, economy, and society. In short, our whole culture was transformed with the invention of movable typography. The development of typographic man has been admirably traced by many scholars from Marshall McLuhan's Gutenberg Galaxy and Febvre, Martin, & Gerard's The Coming of the Book.

As the argument goes, a fundamental transformation in the ordering of our senses emerged from typography such that we have come to rely on vision as our dominant sense - hence, seeing is believing, but also we have come to develop ever new and inventive ways of extending our nervous system into space with vision as the dominant sense in any ratio of the senses. This is accomplished not only with cameras in remote and diverse places, but also the network of computers that make publishing this blog possible. It would be easy to say that the invention of movable type printing transformed the way we communicate - but it is important to remember that these changes were not simple linear developments and they included a devaluation of speech as well as the power inherent in our entire bodies to communicate messages to others.

Walter Ong captured some of these changes in his masterful The Presence of the Word. Building obviously and purposefully on St. John's discussion of the Word made flesh in his gospel, Ong seeks to show the ways the western mind is severely limited by uncritical reliance on typography and takes pains to show how important it is to appreciate the power of speech and sound in communication. He writes,

Sound is more real or existential than other sense objects, despite the fact that it is also more evanescent. Sound itself is related to present actuality rather than to past or future. It must emanate from a source here and now discernibly active, with the result that involvement with sound is involvement with the present, with here-and-now existence and activity. . . .

Presence does not irrupt into voice. One cannot have voice without presence, at least suggested presence. And voice, as will be seen, being the paradigm of all sound for man, sound itself thus of itself suggests presence. Voice is not inhabited by presence as by something added: it simply conveys presence as nothing else does. . . .

That is to say, the spoken word does have more power than the written to do what the word is meant to do, to communicate. We are inclined to think of writing in terms of the very specially gifted and specially trained individuals, professional writers or literary artists who can use writing often in specially controlled or limited circumstances, in truly exceptional ways. We are also likely to forget how very small part of spoken speech can be put into writing that makes sense (111-2, 114-5).

It is not simply that all of this writing and reading brought on by the tremendous increase in publishing since 1455 have been a benefit to humanity. They have also led us to develop our minds and cultures in particular ways - ways that both liberate and constrain us. To be sure, Typographic Man is by no means dead, but he is gradually being made redundant by Digital Man whose tastes tend toward the cinematic-televisual available by way of the personal, handheld communication device and the changes wrought by this new character remain to be seen, but they will be no less profound or deep in terms of the overall picture of humanity five hundred years hence.

What I hope is never lost is the passionate orator in the flesh appealing with voice and body to a multitude of embodied auditors . . .

Seared Walleye

2011-03-01T20:22:00.002-06:00

Thanks to Kathy I had a long lunch today. We went out to the New Scenic Cafe, my favorite restaurant in Duluth, to celebrate our anniversary. (Happy Anniversary, Kathy! Thanks for the many good years.) Fourteen years can go by in the blink of eye, I assure you. In any event, we enjoyed the pistachio encrusted goat cheese salad. I had a seared walleye sandwich on cranberry sourdough - Kathy had a nearly identical sandwich with chicken instead of fish. We followed up by sharing a creme broule and a triple berry pie with ice cream. The walleye was perfectly prepared and everything else was fantastic.

The New Scenic Cafe is across the street from a glorious view of Lake Superior. It was a cold day, but the sun was shining very bright off the lake. Inside, the cafe is decorated in traditional Northern Minnesota decor - lots of light wood on the walls and table tops, some birch and willow branches near the windows, and some funky chandeliers. The service is always good, but, as my friend Ryan pointed out today, one goes to the Scenic for the food - it is always delicious!

The best part, however, was the woman. There's a line from C.S. Lewis' essay, "Meditations in a Toolshed," where he says that when you've really found the one you love it's obvious because fifteen minutes of idle chit-chat with her is worth more than all the favors that all the other women alive could do for you. That sums up perfectly how I feel about Kathy. There are many things I adore about her ~ and I won't go into all of them here ~ but the best thing is how easy it is to be around her, to talk with her, and to spend time with her. I'm glad that she's given me the best part of fourteen years and I hope we'll have many more together.

Ring Out, Wild Bells - Christmas Poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

2010-12-31T12:35:00.003-06:00

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,

The flying cloud, the frosty light;

The year is dying in the night;

Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

Ring out the old, ring in the new,

Ring, happy bells, across the snow:

The year is going, let him go;

Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Ring out the grief that saps the mind,

For those that here we see no more,

Ring out the feud of rich and poor,

Ring in redress to all mankind.

Ring out a slowly dying cause,

And ancient forms of party strife;

Ring in the nobler forms of life,

With sweeter manners, purer laws.

Ring out the want, the care, the sin,

The faithless coldness of the times;

Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes,

But ring the fuller minstrel in.

Ring out false pride in place and blood,

The civic slander and the spite;

Ring in the love of truth and right,

Ring in the common love of good.

Ring out old shapes of foul disease,

Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;

Ring out the thousand wars of old;

Ring in the thousand years of peace.

Ring in the valiant man and free,

The larger heart, the kindlier hand;

Ring out the darkness of the land,

Ring in the Christ that is to be.

Delusions & Commitments

2010-09-23T21:12:00.003-05:00

Of all the books I've read in the last year or so, one of the best was David Bentley Hart's Atheist Delusions. Hart is an Orthodox theologian of immense historical knowledge and logical skill. One of my friends recently remarked that he thought Hart had written a book about the positive contributions of Christianity to culture and politics - and then, as an afterthought, or by way of a persuasive editor, tacked on a critique of New Atheists like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. I think that's probably true, although it's difficult for me to say which of the two parts comprising this book I like more. I find the critique of new atheist arguments compelling and immensely entertaining, but I am particularly enthusiastic about Hart's claims concerning the political implications of Christian doctrine.

Alas, I don't have time for a full review of this book now, but I want to point you to Hart's recent article, Believe It Or Not, in First Things. This picks up a number of his arguments from Atheist Delusions, but goes even farther in with respect to criticizing new atheist logic. Hart's style is a bit abrasive, meant I think to match the style of the new atheists, and his critiques withering, but knowledge and logic give one confidence, I suppose.

One of the things that stands out to me in the article is Hart's confident assertion of the positive role traditional Christianity played in shaping contemporary notions of liberty and equality. Another point, perhaps more powerful in the book length argument, is the positive role that Christianity played in shaping western notions of science. The thing that we should take away from all of this is the realization that religion is probably not going to go away - precisely because humans want their lives to have meaning, to be meaningful, and we shall probably never develop a scientific way of understanding religion - because religion, as it's lived and experienced, is primarily hermeneutic. Science is very good for discovering some kinds of truth, but making and understanding meaning is not one of them.

Another crucial point that Hart makes is that most of what atheists argue against is nothing at all what religious people believe. In this sense, many of the arguments against God are often arguments against a particular version of God that no one believes in. Thus Hart:

But something worse than mere misunderstanding lies at the base of Dawkins’ own special version of the argument from infinite regress—a version in which he takes a pride of almost maternal fierceness. Any “being,” he asserts, capable of exercising total control over the universe would have to be an extremely complex being, and because we know that complex beings must evolve from simpler beings and that the probability of a being as complex as that evolving is vanishingly minute, it is almost certain that no God exists. Q.E.D. But, of course, this scarcely rises to the level of nonsense. We can all happily concede that no complex, ubiquitous, omniscient, and omnipotent superbeing, inhabiting the physical cosmos and subject to the rules of evolution, exists. But who has ever suggested the contrary?

It's also refreshing that Hart is willing to grant nearly everything to serious-minded atheists, but what he feels compelled to reject are half-hearted or dogmatic believers in nothing who want to live with few serious commitments. For this reason, he recommends Nietzsche as the kind of atheist to be - one who understands full and well the deep import and meaning offered by Christianity, but still rejects it, rather than the kind that superficially and wrongly defines Christianity then turns away to their own dogmatic assertions that there is no God as if this constituted an argument against dogmatic religious belief.

Lists

2010-09-17T17:11:00.001-05:00

A video on Umberto Eco's latest work.

Labor Day & Adam Smith

2010-09-06T22:23:00.003-05:00

"All for ourselves, and none for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind." - Adam Smith, 1776

Three recent opinion pieces in the New York Times prompted this post, two are by Paul Krugman and the third by Robert Reich. All three essentially argue that our economic woes will not be fixed without a more significant inducement of government money and a wholesale realignment of our economic structure. I am inclined to agree with their analysis for the following reasons.

First, at the center of our trouble is accumulation by dispossession.

For more than thirty years, economic growth has gone to the top in a winner-take-all system that has dispossessed average citizens in most countries of their wealth. This happened on various lines. For example, the privatization of retirement savings by shifting to 401k plans away from pensions. This foolish move allowed corporations to decrease contributions to retirement plans by claiming that 401k plans had greater value - which is true when markets are rising, but what about now? In 1980 contributions to pension plans were 2-3 percent higher than today, and 66% of US corporations paid for retiree health coverage - that number is now 29% and decreasing.

Another way that the top accumulated wealth by dispossessing others of their property was through debt. Debt levels have been steadily rising among the consumer-ship, but not simply for reasons of over-consumption, but because of increases in the cost of necessities. Going back to the 1960s, private debt levels in the United States were about 50% of GDP and climbing. At the highest point most recently, private debt levels in the United States reached 300% of GDP - in Ireland and Iceland the number was more like 1,000% of GDP. These numbers are not only unsustainable, but they represent a tremendous lack of resources amongst the majority going into a debt cycle to feed the rich. It is always true that people should not borrow money they cannot repay, but we ought to ask what they were borrowing for and remember that those who loaned the money may share the blame . . .

In fact, over-consumption is largely a myth when we control for the poor progress in wages and major increases in housing and health care costs. The average family of four spends 21 percent less on clothing than in the early 1970s, and 22% less on food today. It's true that they eat out more, but they save more by buying things in bulk at big box retailers like Walmart and Costco. The average family spends 44% less on household appliances. These reductions are hardly proof that families are in debt because of over-consumption. It's true that families spend more on home entertainment, but these increases are more than off-set by the savings in the earlier categories mentioned.

So, what explains increases in debt? Many families are in terrible financial trouble - even before the crisis of 2008 and beyond. What explains it? Bad growth in wages, increases in housing and health care costs, and two-income families.

Compensation has been poor for three decades for the reasons mentioned above and because while wages have not increased, families have compensated by both parents working outside the home - in most cases to buy the necessities of life. And it's not just the fact that houses are bigger - McMansion style. The vast majority of American families are living in older houses (both houses I have purchased in my adult life were built in the 1950s). Health care costs are spiraling out of control - health care costs being the number one reason that families declare bankruptcy. And the move to two-income families has actually hurt the American family financially - not just because they have come to rely on both incomes at just the moment that jobs became less secure, but also because the associated costs -second cars and child care - have left families in the 21st century with less money than their counterparts a generation ago.

These are largely structural problems in our economy that cannot be fixed without significant re-prioritizing. It is late and I am tired, but I will suggest before signing off that it would be well to Adam Smith's warning that a society with a vast disparity in wealth between the rich and poor will not long remain free, and that it is the tendency of certain classes to want all for themselves and none for the great bulk of us. We are fools to forget this . . . and Labor Day should be about remembering it.

(Some of the statistics for this post were drawn from Warren & Tyagi, The Two-Income Trap.)

Prophesize!

2010-08-19T13:43:00.002-05:00

Prophesizing is utterly different from prediction. It is itself an effort to induce a right decision, or correct a wrong one. Prophecy is a form of struggle for the future, in order to avoid what is otherwise inevitable.

The moral demands of prophets are made first upon themselves; their credal expressions are at once bodily expressions. This union of credal and bodily motifs is in accord with the Hebrew position that soul has no existence apart from body. There are no disembodied changes conceivable to these vanguard figures. The penetration of God's new word meant that the entire structure of the body was affected. Ezekiel's visions of God were literally hair-raising (Ezekiel 8:3).

Transformative theories are total; there is no immaterial spirit, no dualism, no disembodiment as in the Greek and Christian traditions of transformations. The spirit is a force capable of acting through any of its parts. It is in this sense that the soul is "in the flesh" and that, equally, "the flesh stamps the whole of character of the soul." Moral change, for the first vanguard, is also bodily change. Corruption is never merely spiritual. "The whole head is sick / and the whole heart faint. From the sole of the foot even to the head, / there is no soundness in it" (Isaiah 1:5-6). The Psalms regularly sing this unity of moral and biological properties (Psalms 63:1; 84:3).

- Philip Rieff, Charisma: The Gift of Grace and How It Has Been Taken Away From Us, 2007

Shaking Modern Reason

2010-06-12T14:36:00.006-05:00

EARTHQUAKES: THE CRACKS IN MODERN RATIONALITY

David Charles Gore

University of Minnesota Duluth

On January 12, 2010 a catastrophic earthquake hit off the west coast of Haiti, leveling the city of Port-au-Prince in 30 seconds and killing over a quarter of a million people.

On January 13, 2010, on the Christian Broadcasting Network, Pat Robertson said:

Kristi, something happened a long time ago in Haiti and people might not want to talk about it. They were under the heel of the French. Uh, you know, Napoleon the third, or whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, we will serve you if you will get us free from the French. True story. And so, the devil said, OK, it’s a deal. And, um, they kicked the French out of, the Haitians revolted and got themselves free. But ever since they have been cursed by one thing after the other. Desperately poor. The island of Hispanola is one island, it’s cut down the middle, on the one side is Haiti, on the other side is the Dominican Republic. The Dominican Republic is prosperous, healthy, full of resorts, etcetera. Haiti is in desperate poverty. Same island. They need to have, and we need to pray for them, a great turning to God. And out of this tragedy I’m optimistic something good may come.

When he started speaking, at the bottom of the screen was a 1-800 number to reach Robertson’s Operation Blessing Disaster Relief Fund. What I want to address, however, are the religious implications of Robertson’s remarks, not in order to defend those remarks, or indeed the implications of what he said so shortly after a terrible earthquake, but rather to defend the possibilities offered by a religious world view.

If read most generously, Robertson’s remark is attempting to explain why Haiti and her people – despite the fact that it is a nation located on the same island as the Dominican Republic – seems to suffer disproportionately more than Dominican Republicans. While he never says a pact with the devil caused the earthquake, he certainly implies that such a pact explains why the Haitians “have been cursed by one thing after the other” – which is most obviously a reference to the earthquake. I think recent socio-economic theory does a good job explaining why such drastic socio-economic differences exist relative to Haiti and the DR, but I want to address the problems caused by Robertson’s comments for modern religious people.

A modern religious person might be in a bind with respect to the implications of Robertson’s comments because he may find himself believing in the science of plate tectonics – that the earth has a rigid exterior plate system with a hot molten core that keeps our planet from being as dry, cold, and desolate as the moon – and, at the same time, believing in God or a devil. Such a person may wish to dismiss Robertson’s claims as bad religion, but he still seems stuck with respect to the dual nature of his beliefs. He seems as if he is in a double bind. Can these beliefs, belief in God and plate tectonics, be reconciled? Need these beliefs be reconciled? Is it even just to use the word belief to characterize the position of the subject vis-à-vis the two very different notions?

One way to address these questions would be to parse the meaning of belief and to talk about the limitations of the stories we tell ourselves about modern reason. This position is carried on with much trepidation by the philosopher William James who wants to find a way to explain religious experience while at the same time maintaining a firm commitment to what Giambattista Vico would call modern study methods. James argues, from time to time, that our modern study methods do a very poor job of accurately describing or accounting for our experience. In his short essay, “On Some Mental Effects of the Earthquake,” detailing his experience as a visiting scholar at Stanford University during the great San Francisco earthquake of 18 April 1906, he argues that science does a poor job explaining the experience of an earthquake. [He had a friend, B., who joked on his leaving Harvard that he would no doubt experience an earthquake while he was in California. The passage is somewhat long, but bear with me]:

As soon as I could think, I discerned retrospectively certain peculiar ways in which my consciousness had taken in the phenomenon. These ways were quite spontaneous, and, so to speak, inevitable and irresistible.

First, I personified the earthquake as a permanent individual entity. It was the earthquake of my friend B.’s augury, which had been lying low and holding itself back during all the intervening months, in order, on that lustrous April morning, to invade my room, and energize the more intensely and triumphantly. It came, moreover, directly to me. It stole in behind my back, and once inside the room, had me all to itself, and could manifest itself convincingly. Animus and intent were never more present in any human action, nor did any human activity ever more definitely point back to a living agent as its source and origin.

All whom I consulted on the point agreed as to this feature in their experience. “It expressed intention,” “It was vicious,” “It was bent on destruction,” “It wanted to show its power,” or what not. To me, it wanted simply to manifest the full meaning of its name. But what was this “It”? To some, apparently, a vague demonic power; to me an individualized being, B.’s earthquake, namely.

One informant interpreted it as the end of the world and the beginning of the final judgment. This was a lady in a San Francisco hotel, who did not think of its being an earthquake till after she had got into the street and some one had explained it to her. She told me that the theological interpretation had kept fear from her mind, and made her take the shaking calmly. For “science,” when the tensions in the earth’s crust reach the breaking-point, and strata fall into an altered equilibrium, earthquake is simply the collective name of all the cracks and shakings and disturbances that happen. They are the earthquake. But for me the earthquake was the cause of the disturbances, and the perception of it as a living agent was irresistible. It had an overpowering dramatic convincingness.

I realize now better than ever how inevitable were men’s earlier mythologic versions of such catastrophes, and how artificial and against the grain of our spontaneous perceiving are the later habits into which science educates us. It was simply impossible for untutored men to take earthquakes into their minds as anything but supernatural warnings or retributions.[1]

As usual, James is careful not to abandon modern science, but to argue that it is a habit that goes against the grain of our experience, and, that while plate tectonics may be convincing to our rational faculty, it offers us very little by way of explanation about the meaning or experience of earthquakes. This is not to justify the implications of Pat Robertson’s earlier remark, but it goes a long way toward justifying the possibility of religious interpretations of experience.

So, I toggle back to a contemporary religious person who does not believe in an angry God who is out to get us, and who does not accept that a 200 year old pact with the devil has any relevance to contemporary times. What could earthquakes mean? Isaiah said,

Thou shalt be visited of the Lord of hosts with thunder, and with earthquake, and great noise, with storm and tempest, and the flame of devouring fire (Isaiah 29:6).

St. John the Revelator warns that one of the plagues poured out on the earth will be “a great earthquake, such as was not since men were upon the earth” (Rev. 16:18). While I am not equipped to say what these statements might mean, they point toward a religious/poetic view of reality that gets too little play in contemporary public discussion. I think they are interesting because they offer the possibility that there may be something behind our experience which we may never fully understand. To see earthquakes as a visitation or sign is to see that there are limits to the world we have constructed for ourselves, and this is a critical insight for anyone who has embraced modern ideas of rationality and reason.

As pointed out in Vico’s New Science, itself a critique of modern rational political science, the study methods of modern political philosophers get something wrong when they attribute order to the rational exercise and arrangement of human power. In Vico’s “poetic economy,” fear of the gods induces men to place limits on their irrational drives so they can achieve order, but always an order on the cusp of chaos. As Giuseppe Mazzotta explains,

Like Lucretius and Hobbes (we can’t but recall Machiavelli’s maxim that it is preferable to the Prince to be feared rather than loved), Vico acknowledges the sovereign prestige of fear in the domain of politics. But fear is not only a strategy of power, a realistic mode of controlling the imminent dangers and real or imaginary threats besetting the security of one’s world. For Vico fear is the ground of the obscure consciousness of a self divided from itself, a terrifying vertigo of self-apprehension that induces man’s “swerve” from the bestial chaos of the origins. This fear, which is a founding moral-political experience, is rooted, Vico says, in the awareness of a lightning bolt that forces archaic man, desirous for self-preservation, to seek shelter in the recesses of the cave, acknowledge his limitations, and submit to the awesome, mysterious power of the divinity (NS, 377-379; 689). Because of the fear of bolts of lightning man builds altars, platforms, Vico places at the center of our field of vision as signs of the wisdom man possesses; man makes his own world (for the world is the one we make), but the lightnings, which are gleams of light that quickly appear and vanish, display the cracks in the architectonics of such a world.[2]

Say what you want about George W. Bush, but Hurricane Katrina, like the lightning and the earthquakes, are signs of the times. They are the signs of every time – signs that reveal the cracks in the foundation of the world we have made for ourselves, signs that show the limitations of our competence; Signs that remind us that despite the fact that we make human nature and can manipulate much of the natural world around us – we did not make the whole of nature. The planets, the sun, the stars, we cannot control. We may choose to say not yet, that with time and practice we will make worlds and stars, but in that choice we risk forgetting that man is a fool, not a sage, and a dependent, mortal fool to boot. Must we have earthquakes and volcanoes and lightning to remind us of this point, and must we forever be surprised by such reminders?

This paper was presented at the Rhetoric Society of America Conference in Minneapolis, MN on 30 May 2010. The photos are of the Morrell family home, my grandmother's family, in the Santa Cruz mountains. The home was destroyed by the Great San Francisco earthquake.

[1] William James, “On Some Mental Effects of the Earthquake,” in William James, Writings 1902-1910 (New York: Library of America, 1987): 1216-1217.

[2] Giuseppe Mazzotta, The New Map of the World: The Poetic Philosophy of Giambattista Vico (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999): 192-193.

2010-06-12T14:34:00.000-05:00

h/t: Dave Siebert

The Energies of Men

2010-05-06T20:53:00.002-05:00

The human individual lives usually far within his limits; he possesses powers of various sorts which he habitually fails to use. He energizes below his maximum, and he behaves below his optimum. In elementary faculty, in coordination, in power of inhibition and control, in every conceivable way, his life is contracted like the field of vision of an hysteric subject - but with less excuse, for the poor hysteric is diseased, while in the rest of us it is only an inveterate habit - the habit of inferiority to our full self - that is bad. - William James, The Energies of Men

I am a Tree

2010-03-31T22:55:00.002-05:00

A little ditty I wrote this evening:

Of the fish in the sea, I am the whale.
Of the animals on the land, I am the wooly mammoth.
Of the birds in the sky, I am the baldest of eagles.
Of the trees in the forest, I am the giant Redwood.

It was inspired by the Bhagavad Gita:

I am the beginning and the middle and the end of all that
is. Of all knowledge I am the knowledge of the Soul. Of
the many paths of reason I am the one that leads to Truth . . . .

I am the cleverness in the gambler's dice. I am the beauty
of all things beautiful. I am victory and the struggle for
victory. I am the goodness of those who are good.

. . . and I am the knowledge of those who know.

Books 2008

2010-01-14T18:30:00.004-06:00

When I started graduate school in 1999 I began keeping a list of all the books I read each year. I only put a book on the list if I read every word of the book carefully. The title for this post is not a typo - I never posted my top ten list for 2008, so I'm doing that now, and will soon post my 2009 top ten. These are ten of the books I most enjoyed in '08 in the order that I read them . . .

1. Richard Preston, The Wild Trees: A Story of Passion and Daring (New York: Random House, 2007). This book has an excellent website. As the subtitle suggests, the work is part adventure book and part love affair. It follows the careers of several different people who are in love with the Redwood forests of Northern California and who are passionate about finding the world's largest trees - and in some cases, climbing them.

2. N.T. Wright, Evil and the Justice of God (Westmont, IL: Intervarsity Press, 2006). N.T. Wright is an Oxford trained New Testament scholar and the Bishop of Durham for the Church of England. This is a profound argument - personal and based strongly in reason - about how evil can be reconciled with belief in a just God. Wright was moved to write this book by the Southeast Asian tsunami of late 2004. One can get a solid precis of the argument by reading his sermon, "God, 9/11, the Tsunami, and the New Problem of Evil." You can read more of Wright's work here.

3. Umberto Eco, Turning Back the Clock: Hot Wars and Media Populism (New York: Harcourt, Inc., 2006). Eco is a medievalist, semiotician, philosopher, literary critic, novelist, communication professor at the University of Bologna, and owner of a 50,000+ volume library. This work is a collection of writings Eco published, mostly in European newspapers, about the role the media plays in politics, war-making, and other public controversies. Eco takes a rather long view about these things, choosing to see much of what goes on today in light of what went on a long time ago.

4. Alasdair MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues (Chicago: Open Court, 1999). MacIntyre is a well known philosopher whose earlier book, After Virtue, was an invitation to return attention to Aristotle's ideas of civic virtue. In this later work, MacIntyre explores what it means that humans are animals, born helpless and entirely dependent, with the longest period from birth to maturity of any animal species. Beginning with man's weakness, dependence, and weak rationality, MacIntyre builds a case for why humanity needs virtue.

5. Victor Hugo, The Toilers of the Sea, trans. James Hogarth (New York: Modern Library, 2002). This novel, by France's and perhaps the world's greatest novelist, is a romantic story about the work required by humanity to master nature. A more accurate translation of the title might be "the workers of the sea," with all the socialist overtones possible of term "workers" in English. The work was originally entitled L'Abime, "The Abyss," and much of the book deals with the Channel islands and the vast Atlantic. When Hugo wrote the book he was living in exile on the Island of Guernsey where he was inspiring his countrymen to revolt against Louis-Napoleon (later, Napoleon III). As Graham Robb writes in the introduction, "Hugo's imagination had thrived on banishment and defeat." (By the bye, if you've not read Graham Robb's biography of Victor Hugo you're missing a great read.)

6. Virgil, The Aeneid, trans. Stanley Lombardo (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 2005). Stanley Lombardo has given the world a great gift. He has translated all three of the world's great epic poems - the Iliad, Odyssey, and the Aeneid - into American. Yes, that's right, not just the good old King's English, but a truly American translation that allows us in our own time to truly understand by analogy what on earth these great poems are really about. Exhibit A for this claim: go to amazon and check out the cover art on these great works and you'll see what I mean. For a snippet, consider this description of the angered Turnus, leaping down from his chariot, and careening madly through the enemy lines:

Think of a stone crashing down a mountain,
Either a storm has washed it free, or time
In its passing has loosened it, and now
The shameless mass of rock sweeps down
The steep slopes and bounds over the earth,
Rolling along with its trees, herds, and men.

7. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007). This is a monumental work by one of the world's leading philosophers attempting to explain secularism to itself, historically and philosophically. No precis could do it justice. The work was very well written and taught me much that I didn't know about knowledge and belief and how they're inextricably related, among many other things about history, religion, secularism, &c.

8. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). The argument of this book is that nations are imagined before they are realized, and that the first reason why a Minnesotan and an Arkansan, for example, think of themselves as part of the same community, but the Minnesotan and the Canadian just 100 miles away do not is because we've imagined the world to be a certain way. In other words, it is language and ideas that drive political realities, perhaps more than political or material realities drive political realities. This is a short work, but very much worth reading for those interested in political philosophy, &c.

9. Richard Reeves, John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand (London: Atlantic Books, 2007). Reeves is a journalist; Mill was a journalist, philosopher, and, effectively, secretary of state for the British Empire. Reeves approach to Mill is one I like because it doesn't treat him as philosopher living in isolation, but an active participant in politics and public life.

10. David Daniell, William Tyndale: A Biography (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1994). When I read this book I was overcome by Tyndale's single-minded purposefulness in translating the Bible into English. Not only did he literally give his life to this cause, but he had to sacrifice a great deal to bring about his great achievement before he died. He translated the New Testament first. When he decided to translate the Old Testament there was one problem. He couldn't read Hebrew. When he discovered that there was no other English speaking person alive at the time who could read Hebrew, he moved to Germany to learn it so he could continue his work. Now that's determination. I wish I had some single-minded purpose of such scope and noble meaning and the Christian courage to carry it out by giving my life to it. Inspiring.

Honorable mentions in 2008 should go to Kenneth Burke, Walter Bagehot, Jules Michelet, David Hume, and the ever-readable Cicero.

May you have more time to read this year than last . . .

Book Review: The Mystery of Capital

2010-01-12T22:07:00.003-06:00

Book Review: Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else (New York: Basic Books, 2000).

Hernando de Soto, named after the Spanish explorer, is a Peruvian economist and President of the Institute for Liberty and Democracy in Lima, Peru. He is a former economist for the GATT and former governor of Peru's central reserve bank. In this well-researched and clearly written book he seeks to explain why the world's poor seem to find no traction in the world's economy despite the fact that they have considerable assets. Yes, that's right, de Soto's starting claim is that the world's poor have tremendous wealth, but virtually no capital. They find themselves in this unfortunate predicament primarily by virtue of the laws of the countries in which they live.

The poor inhabitants of these nations - five-sixths of humanity - do have things, but they lack the process to represent their property and create capital. They have houses, but not titles; crops, but not deeds; businesses but not statutes of incorporation. It is the unavailability of these essential representations that explains why people who have adapted every other Western invention, from the paper clip to the nuclear reactor, have not been able to produce sufficient capital to make their domestic capitalism work (6-7)

Wealthy westerners live in a world where they can convert their money to capital and back again easily. The world's poor are not so lucky. To gain an idea of how difficult the migrant life of the world's poor is, de Soto's research associates decided to run an experiment in Lima, Peru. They would start a legitimate business by legal means. They filled out forms, took bus trips to central Lima to get certifications, filled out forms, &c. The team spent six hours a day and finally succeeded in registering a small garment workshop - 289 days later - having spent $1,231 - thirty-one times the monthly minimum wage! They then decided to obtain legal authorization to build a house on state-owned land. This process took six years and eleven months, requiring 207 administrative steps in fifty-two government offices. To obtain legal title for that piece of land took 728 more steps. To obtain official recognition for a private bus, jitney, or taxi took twenty-six months of red tape (pp. 18-20).

They and their associates repeated the experiments in other poor nations:

In the Philippines, to purchase legally a dwelling that has already been built on state-owned or privately owned urban land necessitated 168 steps, involving fifty-three public and private agencies and took 13-25 years. If the dwelling is in an area considered "agricultural," the settler would have to clear 45 additional bureaucratic procedures before 13 entities, adding two more years to his request (20).
In Egypt, to acquire and legally register a lot on state owned desert land - 77 procedures must be performed at thirty-one public and private agencies,taking anywhere from five to fourteen years. This explains why 4.7 million Egyptians have chosen to build their dwellings illegally. If, after having done so, he wants to legitimize his property, he risks having it demolished, paying a steep fine, and serving up to ten years in prison (20-21).
In Haiti, one way an ordinary citizen can settle legally on government land is to lease it from the government for five years and then buy it. This process takes 65 steps and a little more than two years just for the privilege of leasing the land for five years. To buy it requires 111 more steps, and twelve more years, 19 years in total (21).

"Yet even this long ordeal will not ensure that the property remains legal. In fact, in every country we investigated, we found that it is very nearly as difficult to stay legal as it is to become legal" (21).

The poor, not being stupid, of course end up building, holding, buying and selling their domains in an "extralegal" market - a domain outside the official law. The result is that their resources are essentially invisible.

HOW MUCH IS THIS DEAD CAPITAL WORTH?
A shanty in Port-au-Prince: $500.
A cabin by a polluted waterway in Manila: $2700.
A substantial house in a village outside Cairo: $5000.
A respectable bungalo with a garage and picture window in Lima: $20,000.

Collectively, the value of holdings by the world's poor outweighs the total wealth of the rich! (33) "By [de Soto's] calculations, the total value of the real estate held but not legally owned by the poor of the Third World and former communist nations is at least $9.3 trillion" (35). This is twice as much as the total circulating US money supply, nearly as much as the total value of all the companies listed on the main stock exchanges of the world's twenty most developed nations, more than 20 times the total Foreign Direct Investment into all Third World and Communist nations in the ten years from 1989-1999 (35).

As de Soto repeats again and again: the world's poor are not the problem, they are the solution.

THE PROBLEM for many of the world's poor is that they do not have access to capital. They cannot use their wealth. With no address and no legally recognized title, the owner of a plywood shack with a cement floor and a tin roof, worth about $500, cannot secure a fifty dollar loan to buy a bicycle - or whatever. The point is that they are hampered by their lack of access to capital - capital being not money, which they have, however little, but potential to turn that money into a better life.

To unravel the mystery of capital, we have to go back to the seminal meaning of the word. In medieval Latin, "capital" appears to have denoted head of cattle or other livestock, which have always been important sources of wealth beyond the basic meat they provide. Livestock are low-maintenance possessions; they are mobile and can be moved away from danger; they are also easy to count and measure. But most important, from livestock you can obtain additional wealth, or surplus value, by setting in motion other industries, including milk, hides, wool, meat, and fuel. Livestock also have the useful attribute of being able to reproduce themselves. Thus the term "capital" begins to do two jobs simultaneously, capturing the physical dimensions of assets (livestock) as well as their potential to generate surplus value (40-41).

In short, capital comes from inside your head. Capital is a mental phenomenon. For some reason, many poorer nations have imagined that the poor are not a part of the nation's wealth.

As the flux of extralegal workers continue to gather in the world's cities (see this TED talk about the world's shadow cities and its 1.6 billion squatters), politics and the law will have to respond appropriately to the needs of the world's migrant poor. They face the same choice that the United States faced in the 19C when they had to decide what to do with the thousands of peoples flocking to the American West. Either they must take these "extralegals" and make them part of the dominant legal system or they must fight the common sense of large communities and ultimately undermine the cohesion of society as well as the coherence of the state's legal system. (In one country, a newspaper inspired by de Soto's research discovered that the mansion in which the nation's president lived had no legal title!)

In conclusion, Hernando de Soto believes that the best way to enrich the world's poor is to take the perspective of the poor to understand their needs and coopt the elites by showing them the economic potential of the poor. There is much more in this detailed book, but the most powerful implication of de Soto's argument is that people are a safe bet, whether rich or poor.

This article was cross-posted to www.omninerd.com

'Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend'

2010-01-09T16:02:00.004-06:00

Justus quidem tu es, Domine, si disputem tecum: verumtamen justa
loquar ad te: Quare via impiorum prosperatur? &c.

Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend
With thee; but, sir, so what I plead is just.
Why do sinners' ways prosper? and why must
Disappointment all I endeavour end?

Wert thou my enemy, O thou my friend,
How wouldst thou worse, I wonder, than thou dost
Defeat, thwart me? Oh, the sots and thralls of lust
Do in spare hours more thrive than I that spend,
Sir, life upon thy cause. See, banks and brakes
Now leaved how thick! laced they are again
With fretty chervil, look, fresh wind shakes
Them; birds build - but not I build; no, but strain,
Time's eunuch, and not breed one work that wakes.
Mine, O thou lord of life, send my roots rain.

- Gerard Manley Hopkins

A September Morn

2010-01-09T16:00:00.000-06:00

This is to atone for my last video.

The King of England

2009-12-24T00:25:00.004-06:00

I don't know why I find this so funny. Perhaps it has something to do with submitting final grades and finishing another semester. In any event, I can relate to the "it's like eating crunchy air" comment. Happy Holidays, y'all!

Why not a Global Pledge of Allegiance?

2009-12-19T22:54:00.003-06:00

A lot of my colleagues complain about having to grade student papers. I suppose I sometimes fall into that trap, but often I read papers by students that are brilliant. Tonight was one of those nights. We have been discussing the possibilities of a global civil society, and the students were assigned to read Mary Kaldor's book, Global Civil Society. One of my students wrote a line in her paper, mimicking the United States pledge of allegiance, asking why not?: "I pledge allegiance to the world." This prompted the following from myself:

I pledge allegiance to the citizens of the world, and to the Republic of hearts and minds, prayers and tears, life and death to which we ALL belong, one people, the children of God, indivisible, with liberty, love, and justice for all.

How about it? Something wrong with the idea? Are the ties of nationalism outdated? Isn't it time to look for a Republic of Conscience? To carry our own burdens? To recognize our origins in salt and tears? To recognize our dual citizenship? Why not a pledge of allegiance to our humanity, our dependence, our weakness? I love my country, don't get me wrong, but I love other countries too. "My heart is large enough for all men," said Joseph Smith, and I feel much the same way today. Who can separate us?

P.S. Bonus quote: "What we seek is . . . to improve the quality of human life while at the same time respecting the natural environment which sustains it: Not a heaven on earth but a better earth on earth." - Paul Wellstone

The Crucial Crisis

2009-12-06T15:44:00.003-06:00

The first and, finally, the sole history that I know and can accomplish is my own contingent, limited, mortal history. All history amounts to my history, because it derives from it. There is no solipsism in this circle, just the admission that my life remains mine, unsubstitutable, unique, unrepeatable - thrown forth and lost at once. Why does history itself amount to my history and my history to irrevocable uniqueness? Because I must die. To die signifies to die alone. To die signifies that nobody will die in my place; the proof: if someone commits himself to die in my place, that will not exempt me from dying, later, on my own account, and, if it can be put thus, in my own place; there is no one but me who can truly die in my place; my place is even defined by this unsubstitutable death. Death will never be taken from us, and in the end it is death that attests to our irreducible singularity. No one can separate me or dislodge me from my death, for in order to take it from me he would have to begin by giving it to me. In this death, which makes me me at the very moment when it undoes my me, all is decided for and by me, and all the former antagonisms are settled. We must say, then, that one crisis remains accessible to me when all the others have lost their edge and slipped away - my death.

- Jean-Luc Marion, Prolegomena to Charity

Corners of Peace

2009-12-04T23:04:00.002-06:00

In omnibus requiem quaesivi, et nusquam inveni nisi in angulo cum libro.
- Thomas à Kempis

Everywhere I have searched for peace and nowhere found it, except in a corner with a book.
- Thomas à Kempis

9/11/1989 and 9/11/2001

2009-11-09T21:38:00.003-06:00

I didn’t want today to pass without some mention of the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall. This happened on 9 November 1989, or 9/11/89 (Europeans reckon their dates with the day before the month). Timothy Garton Ashe has noted that the two 9/11’s, Europe’s and America’s, have yielded two fundamentally different outlooks on the world – the one, tearing walls down and looking for opportunities to promote international citizenship through diplomacy and tact; the other, throwing walls up and looking for opportunities to promote international democracy at the point of a gun. Ashe asks, what has and will America do with their ascendancy? What relevance and influence does Europe have twenty years after the fall of the wall?

The answer to some of these questions depends on how one chooses to explain why the wall fell. Americans, especially Republicans, are fond of arguing that the wall fell because of Mr. Reagan’s anti-Soviet rhetoric, including his Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall address. This explanation justifies Mr. Reagan’s big defense budgets, Star Wars rhetoric, and repeated tax increases. Another explanation, favored by many Europeans and some Americans, is that the wall fell because of diplomacy, propaganda, and the Helsinki Accords.

For my part, I think they’re both right. Reagan’s rhetoric and theatrical powers were critical, but Gorbachev’s role is significantly downplayed. European diplomacy, including efforts by the Catholic Church in Poland and elsewhere, and the general resuscitation of civil society behind the iron curtain was essential. The anti-nuclear efforts of Americans, including Daniel and Philip Berrigan, kept the conversation moving and gave credence to peace movements in Eastern bloc countries. The Velvet Revolution and samizdat do not get enough traction in American explanations. Churchill’s prediction in January 1920 that Communism in Russia would fail because it was “fundamentally opposed to the needs and dictates of the human heart, and of human nature itself,” is good evidence in my mind that it wasn’t all Reagan. The system self-destructed in many ways, but Reagan no doubt helped it along.

Just as the causes are multiple and complex, the effects and reverberations often take a long, long time to work themselves out. It’s fair to say that the Second World War ended with the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, but in another sense it didn’t. Osama bin Laden cut his international teeth in Afghanistan during the cold war of the 1980s . . . and Afghanistan and bin Laden are with us yet. Indeed, America’s 9/11 was a logical outgrowth of the Cold War, even if many don't want him to remind us. Leninism married to capitalism is a long way from dead in China – indeed, it presents a new kind of challenge to the heavily leveraged “wealthy nations” of the west. The fall of the Berlin wall was a long reverberation of earlier events; the reverberation of the Berlin wall’s fall is still rippling its way.

That way will be determined in large part by what we think of it, how we talk about it, and how we remember it. It is certainly true that Europeans will have learned different lessons from this momentous event than Americans. It is expectedly and appropriately thus, but the forces that shaped this event and are now shaping world events compel us to continue conversations about their meaning and significance.

(Cross-posted to www.omninerd.com.)

Virtue Ethics, Part III: The Theological Virtues

2009-10-12T22:37:00.003-05:00

Having discussed virtue ethics and the Cardinal virtues of Prudence, Justice, Courage, and Temperance in Part I & Part II, this post addresses the theological or Christian virtues of Faith, Hope, and Love.

It is essential for the sake of the argument that readers find a way to bracket their qualms about religion (at least momentarily, and not entirely). My assertion is two-fold, that human nature is religious (following William James) and that the virtues of Faith, Hope, and Love are higher virtues than the four Cardinal virtues. At the same time, the higher virtues are entirely necessary for the full flourishing of our nature, and for human communities, from families to neighborhoods to nations, to live virtuously. Without them, we so far fail to reach our virtuous potential.

Consider for a moment the postmodern philosopher Jack Caputo’s take on the theological virtues, from his book On Religion, as a way into the discussion:

The present and the future-present fall under the range of our powers, our potencies, our possibilities. Here things are manageable, cut to size and proportioned to our knowledge, so that we know what to do in the present situation and what to expect in the future. Here we are self-possessed and we have our bearings. This is the sphere of what the medieval theologians called the “cardinal” virtues, the four strictly philosophical virtues “prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance,” upon which human life is propped as upon the four hinges ( cardines ) of a table. These are the virtues of the self-possessed, of the best and the brightest, what Aristotle called the " phronimoi ," the men (and he meant men ) of practical wisdom, of insight and practical know-how, the well-hinged who know what is what, the men of means who went to all the best schools and who set the pace for the rest of us who are lower down on Aristotle’s very aristocratic list. But when we come unhinged, when our powers and potencies are driven to their limits, when we are overwhelmed, exposed to something we cannot manage or foresee, then, in that limit situation of the possibility of the impossible, we experience the limits, the impossibility, of our own possibilities. Then we sink to our knees in faith and hope and love, praying and weeping like mad. These are what the theologians call (somewhat chauvinistically) the “theological” virtues, by which they mean that we have come up against the impossible. Here, in the sphere of these limit situations we are asked to believe what seems incredible (remember Mary, or father Abraham trekking his way to Moriah). For after all, to believe what seems highly credible or even likely requires a minimum of faith, whereas to believe what seems unbelievable, what it seems impossible to believe, that is really faith. If you have real faith, Jesus said, you could say to the mountain, “‘move from here to there,’ and it will move; and nothing shall be impossible for you’” (Matt. 17:20). So, too, to hope when all seems hopeless, to “hope against hope,” as St. Paul says (Rom. 4:18), that is really hope, as opposed to the sanguinity that comes when the odds are on our side, which is the hope of a mediocre fellow. Finally, to dare to love someone far above our station, like a beggar in love with a princess, or to dare to think that someone so wonderful could love us, to dare to love in such an impossible situation, that is love worth its salt. Or, to go to a further and still more paradoxical extreme: to love someone who is not lovable. It is no great feat, after all, to love the loveable, to love our friends and those who tell us we are wonderful; but to love the unlovable, to love those who do not love us, to love our enemies – that is love. That is impossible, the impossible, which is why we love it all the more.

The Cardinal virtues, in other words, speak to everyday material conditions, including managing risk, dealing within human power. The theological virtues, on the other hand, are for when we reach the limits of the ordinary. They are the virtues of our spiritual nature.

Faith. “Faith,” Dierdre McCloskey writes, “is a backward looking virtue. It concerns who we are; or, rather, italicized, who we are, ‘the mystic chords of memory.’ In personal and modern terms it is called ‘integrity’ or ‘identity.’” To say that you’re faithful to your spouse, for example, is to say that you’re true to them, their memory, and your promise. Faith remembers. Faith, being, in St. Paul’s words, “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen,” cannot be blind. Or, rather, it may be better said that faith has to do with the ear rather than the eye. Fides ex auditu. Faith comes from hearing.

In his book, Faith, Hope, Love, Josef Pieper begins by asking, "Who really determines what is meant by “belief”? What do men mean when they say . . . “belief”? . . . . “believe” can be replaced by “think”, “assume”, “consider probable”, “suppose” (Pieper, 19, 26-27). “To believe always means: to believe someone and to believe something.” And no one can live life without beliefs. The principle of faith was defended best by the atheist David Hume who insisted that speaking philosophically the idea of cause and effect is the one thing we know the least about – especially when we’re talking about human action. That moment, for example, when one billiard ball hits another – that’s the moment we know nothing about. What was the cause of the second ball moving? The other ball? The stick that hit that ball? The arm holding the stick? The brain moving the arm? Most of life has to be taken on past experience and convention. We don’t know the egg on the table doesn’t have a poison yolk, but we dig in any way because we believe it’ll be just like all the other eggs we’ve eaten.

“Unbelief contradicts what man is by nature” (Pieper, Faith, Hope, Love, p. 63). Truth – especially human truths about social and political organization and religion – is not some neutral thing. A jury cannot be neutral about murder, only about whether x committed murder. Truth may not be approached without allegiance, without acknowledging its claim on us, or without respect for its rank, worth, and beauty. The essence of this trust in truth is faith. While most social science today is built on the illusion that certainty can be attained in matters of social truth, another way to think is the realization that much of social life depends on faith in other people, which depends more on understanding than certainty.

Hope. “Hope is, by contrast to faith, forward-looking, the virtue of the energetic . . . It is the opposite of . . . spiritual sloth, despair, hopelessness” (McCloskey, The Bourgeois Virtues, 160). If you have no hope you kill your self. As McCloskey points out, America is rootless and faithless, for the most part, but Americans have always had an abundance of hope.

“Hope says: It will turn out well; or more accurately and characteristically: It will turn out well for mankind; or even more characteristically: It will turn out well for us, for me myself. . . . Both he who hopes and he who despairs choose these attitudes with their will and let them determine their conduct” (Pieper, Faith, Hope, Love, p. 114).

Love. All you need is love. It is the pinnacle of human virtue. When I say I love you, I’m saying I’m glad that you exist, Pieper says. The next question, then, is am I glad that you exist for my sake or for your sake? If the latter, I’m achieving a higher kind of human experience, the fulfillment of a higher kind of desire. Of course, we often need those we love, not merely for the love they give us, but also to have something to love (and for many other reasons). Nevertheless, Love is always particular. “What is not loved for its own sake is not loved at all,” says St. Augustine.

The Greeks had many names for love. Storge: affection, especially of parents to offspring, and of offspring to parents. Philia: brotherly love or friendship; dispassionate love that includes loyalty to friends and family; from it we get Philosophy – the love of wisdom and Philadelphia – the city of brotherly love. Eros: erotically charged love; passionate and sensual; romantic longing. Agape: self-less, pure love.

Love seen in terms of these types suggests it may have various manifestations. There is gentle love and tough love. "Maternal love does not have to be “earned”; and there is nothing anyone can do to lose it. A father, on the contrary, tends to set conditions; his love has to be earned. But that likewise repeats a fundamental element peculiar to all love: the desire that the beloved not only “feel good” but that things may go well for him. A mature person’s love must, as has rightly been remarked, contain both elements, the maternal and paternal, something unconditional and something demanding" (Pieper, Faith, Hope, Love, p. 273).

“There may well be untold number of possible ways for human beings to feel good toward one another . . . But varied as these forms and unsystematic as these degrees of fondness, attachment, liking, solidarity obviously may be, they all have one thing in common with friendship, parental love, fraternity and specifically erotic love: that the lover, turning to the beloved, says, “It’s good that you are here; it’s wonderful that you exist!”" (Pieper, Faith, Hope, Love, p. 273).

Speaking existentially, it’s a good thing for all living beings that there is love. It may yet be the mechanism of evolution, as argued by the philosopher Charles Sanders Pierce in his brilliant essay, "Evolutionary Love." (I mentioned this argument to a friend of mine in medical school. He huffed, incredulous, and asked, “does the cell divide because of love?” I say, at least one did.)

In closing, let me re-state un-categorically my central claims:

First, that living virtuously depends on the knowledge we have of virtue (including the understanding that virtue is a mean between vices) and of the power we have to do and apply the virtues in our lives. Virtue can be taught and learned and can be adopted by habit to become second nature.

Second, that the Cardinal virtues of Prudence, Justice, Courage, and Temperance are the virtues of the community. All of public life, from markets to courts to tennis matches, depend on people who act prudently, justly, courageously, and temperantly.

Third, that humans live by the virtues of faith, hope, and love everyday. Many may no longer charge these virtues with theological import, but we can no sooner be deprived of them than we can food and water. We live by faith; we hope for a better world; we long for that love that will never cease.

(This piece was cross-posted to www.omninerd.com.)

Virtue Ethics Part II: The Cardinal or Pagan Virtues

2009-09-19T19:34:00.003-05:00

In Part I, I situated virtue ethics within alternative approaches to morality in modern philosophy. This post describes four of the seven classical virtues known as the Cardinal or Pagan virtues: Prudence, Justice, Courage, and Temperance. Part III will discuss the theological or Christian virtues: Faith, Hope, and Love.

Deirdre McCloskey, in her Inaugural James M. Buchanan Lecture, argues that the seven classical virtues are as the primary colors of virtue. Just as every color in the spectrum is derived from the three primary colors, so every virtue imaginable, McCloskey asserts, can be derived from the seven classical virtues. For example, honesty is Justice and Temperance in matters of speech; thrift is prudence and temperance in money matters, etc.

It has been said that the Cardinal virtues are the virtues of the city, of public life, and that the absence of these virtues leads to failed cities and states. One can make a strong case that the four cardinal virtues are the virtues of citizenship, whereas the three theological virtues bind us to a higher vision of human nature. The best philosophical analysis of the virtues is by the philosopher Josef Pieper, a close student of St. Thomas Aquinas, and what follows leans heavily on Pieper’s work The Four Cardinal Virtues: Prudence, Justice, Fortitude, Temperance.

Prudence: Prudence is the virtue most concerned with the self. It is foresight, practical understanding, proficiency, sagacity. Save some for a rainy day. The Latin phrase, recta ratio agilbilium constitutes the best definition of prudence: right reason about things to be done or the right method of conduct. Prudence, like all the virtues, is active. It is basically concerned with how we treat ourselves, how we prepare for our future and make ourselves useful in the present.

The contemporary term self-interest is often our poor substitute for thinking and talking prudently. The term “self-” makes the aim seem subjective rather than virtuous, but they are not always mutually exclusive. It is prudent for me to care for my own children, for example because they will be more likely to care for me. This may sound selfish rather than virtuous, but virtue adheres in seeing Prudence as one among the virtues. In other words, I may care for my own because it’s Prudent, but I may also do it because it is Just and because I Love them. Seeing this broader picture is a means of understanding that possessing one virtue does not make us virtuous.

Prudence is the father of the virtues, or the charioteer of the virtues, using Aristotle and Aquinas’s system, because it is the virtue of the mind that helps us find the golden mean in any given circumstance. It is the virtue of making right decisions and thus drives, as a charioteer drives a chariot, the other six virtues.

Justice: If Prudence is concerned with the self, Justice is the virtue that regulates our relationships with others. Justice is uprightness, equity, vindicating the right, giving to others what is due them with pleasure, consistently, and in a timely manner. It is paying what is owed, fulfilling the terms of a contract to a T, imparting fairly by good measure, pressed down and shaken together (see Luke 6:38).

Aristotle said that Justice is concerned with geometrical proportion, meaning that its interest is equality between two things. “This, then,” Aristotle says, “is what the just is – the proportional; the unjust is what violates the proportion. Hence one term becomes too great, the other too small, as indeed happens in practice; for the man who acts unjustly has too much, and the man who is unjustly treated too little, of what is good.”

Much has been said and written about justice, its administration and its function. Different conceptions of justice have emerged to describe different aspects of the same coin: distributive justice is concerned with a just distribution of goods throughout society; retributive justice is the idea that a proportional punishment evens out a crime: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth (and if we followed this rule, Gandhi says, we’d soon all be blind and toothless); restorative justice is a way of conceptualizing crime as against individuals and communities rather than against the state, encouraging offenders to make reparations for offenses.

The question that should be asked, Pieper says, is when justice may be said to prevail in a nation? "One might almost say that the subject of justice is the “community,” although of course it is only the person, and, therefore, the individual, who can be just in the strict sense of the word. . . . it is the nature of communal life for men constantly to become indebted to each other and then just as constantly to pay one another the debt. We have further said that as a result the balance is in a constant state of shift and needs constantly to be restored to equilibrium. The act of justice is precisely to effect this process of compensations, restitutions, and satisfactions for debts" (Pieper, 70, 104).

Yet, at the same time, “the fact that some debts are not or cannot be paid is essential to the world’s actual conditions” (Pieper, 104). The community must pursue justice, but as a virtue it is only one piece of the puzzle of virtuous living.

Courage: Courage is spirit. Courage is heart. Courage is self-control in the face of fear. In Part I, I described courage as occurring on a continuum between over-confidence and cowardice. It is a willingness to take risks, to assert oneself – not always for the sake of oneself – but for the sake of a higher purpose, too. It includes a willingness to risk one’s life, but for the purpose of justice rather than merely saving one’s self.

To be courageous and brave, Pieper argues, presupposes vulnerability. If there were no vulnerability and no fear there could be no courage. The ultimate injury is death, and courage “is basically readiness to die or, more accurately, readiness to fall, to die, in battle” (Pieper, 117). But the brave man does not suffer injury or risk death for its own sake, “but rather as a means to preserve or to acquire a deeper, more essential intactness,” meaning it is about achieving a lost wholeness (Pieper, 119).

Temperance: Like Courage, temperance is self-control, but self-control in the face of pleasure. Today it means being temperate in eating and drinking, but in the classical world it meant the moderation of anger, sexuality, and attitude (humility). Aquinas says that the second meaning of temperance is “serenity of spirit,” which must go deeper than the surface of intellectual and spiritual life to man’s inner order (Pieper, 147).

Temperance may apply to all pleasures, but Aristotle argues that it applies primarily to bodily pleasures of touch. In other words, we would not call a lover of honor or a lover of learning to be self-indulgent. Nor would we say that someone who delighted in objects of vision – like colors – or of hearing – like music – as acting self-indulgently, nor those who act towards these things as they ought temperate. As it applies to touch, however, temperance includes chastity and unchastity as well as food and drink. Anger, too, in this manner: “In the upsurge of his self-will,” Pieper writes, “the intemperately angry man feels as if he were drawing his whole being together like a club ready to strike” (195)

Temperance is the virtue most concerned with the body and with nature. Everyone gets hungry and thirsty or craves sexual connection. Where we most likely go wrong in these endeavors is the direction of excess. To become a slave to self-indulgence is voluntary, and means that we place our own pleasure at the cost of everything else.

This entry was cross-posted at www.omninerd.com.

Reaction to Delusions

2009-09-11T22:44:00.004-05:00

The rather petulant subtitle that Christopher Hitchens has given his (rather petulantly titled) God is Not Great is How Religion Poisons Everything. Naturally one would not expect him to have squandered any greater labor of thought on the dust jacket than on the disturbingly bewildered text that careens so drunkenly across its pages - reeling up against a missed logical connection here, steadying itself against a historical error there, stumbling everywhere over all those damned conceptual confusions littering the carpet - but one does still have to wonder how he expects any reflective reader to interpret such a phrase. Does he really mean precisely everything? Would that apply, then - confining ourselves just to things Christian - to ancient and medieval hospitals, leper asylums, orphanages, almshouses, and hostels? To the golden rule, "Love thine enemies," "Judge not lest ye be judged," prophetic admonitions against oppressing the poor, and commands to feed the clothe and comfort those in need? To the music of Palestrina and Bach, Michelangelo's Pieta, "ah! bright wings," San Marco's mosaics, the Bible of Amiens, and all that gorgeous blue stained glass at Chartres? To the abolitionist movement, the civil rights movement, and contemporary efforts to liberate Sudanese slaves? And so on and so on? Surely it cannot be the case that, if only purged of the toxin of faith, these things would be even better than they are; were it not for faith, it seems fairly obvious, most of them would have no existence at all. And since none of these things would seem to fall outside the general category of "everything," it must be that Hitchens means (assuming he means anything at all) that they fall outside the more specific category of "religion." This would, at any rate, be in keeping with one of the rhetorical strategies especially favored in New Atheist circles: one labels anything one dislikes - even if it is found in a purely secular setting - "religion" (thus, for example, all the twentieth-century totalitarianisms are "political religions" for which secularists need take no responsibility), while simultaneously claiming that everything good, in the arts, morality, or any other sphere - even if it emerges within an entirely religious setting - has only an accidental association with religious belief and is really, in fact, common human property (so, for example, the impulse toward charity will doubtless spring up wherever an "enlightened: society takes root). By the same token, every injustice that seems to follow from a secularist principle is obviously an abuse of that principle, while any evil that comes wrapped in a cassock is unquestionably an undiluted expression of religion's very essence.

- David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions

Bishop N.T. Wright and Historical Resurrection

2009-09-09T21:35:00.001-05:00

forgyf us ure gyltas

2009-09-09T21:08:00.004-05:00

Faeder ure, thu the eart on heofenum,
si thin nama gehalgod.
To-becume thin rice.
Geweorthe thin willa
on eorthan, swa swa on heofenum.
Urne daeghwamlican hlaf syle us to-daeg.
And forgyf us ure gyltas,
swa swa we forgifath urum gyltendum.
And ne gelaede thu us on costnunge,
ac alys us of yfle:
Sothlice.

- The Lord's Prayer as written in the southwest of England about the year 1000.

Virtue Ethics Part I: Virtue among Alternatives

2009-09-08T22:28:00.003-05:00

There are, of course, as many theories for rationalizing human behavior as there are humans. In the west, in the last two-hundred and fifty years, there have been two influentially dominant modes of approaching moral behavior: the deontological approach favored by Immanuel Kant and the utilitarian approach invented by Jeremy Bentham and honed by John Stuart Mill and later the American pragmatists William James and the late Richard Rorty. The former emphasizes the morality of duty and focuses on individual motive, but often in idealized conditions. The latter determines the goodness (utility) of an act by its consequences, that is, its contribution to the quotient of happiness (the total happiness possible in a society) – if an act increases the total happiness it is good, if not, bad. Thus a sort of contest between the deontological approach (obligations, moral universals, and following rules) versus the utilitarian approach (responsibility solely for the consequences of our own actions) ensued.

A third way of thinking about the morality of behavior is known as virtue ethics. It originated with Aristotle and has ebbed and flowed along with his reputation, but its greatest expounder was St. Thomas Aquinas. Virtue ethics has experienced something of a resurgence in the last fifty years. Rather than emphasizing duty or consequences, this approach emphasizes habits. Developing character is a function of good habits developed within particular circumstances.

Aristotle taught in his Nicomachean Ethics that each virtue should be seen as existing on a continuum. Achieving virtue means finding the place along that continuum that fits the occasion. Consider, for example, courage. Courage exists on a continuum between cowardice and foolhardiness or recklessness. A general may see that the odds are stacked against him, and thus his decision to walk away from a fight might be a courageous one (see, for example, the career of General George Washington). On another occasion, that same general may decide to lead a charge in which he and all his men are massacred, but still they acted courageously. In different times and circumstances, the virtue of courage may be closer to recklessness than cowardice and other times it may all be reversed. Wherever virtue happens to fall on the continuum, given all the elements of the circumstances, Aristotle names the golden mean. The golden mean, in other words, moves along the continuum at different times and different places and hitting that mean is the achievement of virtue in that circumstance.

This is not to say that the virtues are relative so much as contextual. Consider the elaboration of the virtue of gratitude by another great virtue ethicist, Adam Smith, from Part III of his brilliant work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments:

The general rules of almost all the virtues, the general rules which determine what are the offices of prudence, of charity, of generosity, of gratitude, of friendship, are in many respects loose and inaccurate, admit of many exceptions, and require so many modifications, that it is scarce possible to regulate our conduct entirely by a regard to them. The common proverbial maxims of prudence, being founded in universal experience, are perhaps the best general rules which can be given about it. To affect, however, a very strict and literal adherence to them would evidently be the most absurd and ridiculous pedantry. Of all the virtues I have just now mentioned, gratitude is that, perhaps, of which the rules are the most precise, and admit of the fewest exceptions. That as soon as we can we should make a return of equal, and if possible of superior value to the services we have received, would seem to be a pretty plain rule, and one which admitted of scarce any exceptions. Upon the most superficial examination, however, this rule will appear to be in the highest degree loose and inaccurate, and to admit of ten thousand exceptions. If your benefactor attended you in your sickness, ought you to attend him in his? or can you fulfil the obligation of gratitude, by making a return of a different kind? If you ought to attend him, how long ought you to attend him? The same time which he attended you, or longer, and how much longer? If your friend lent you money in your distress, ought you to lend him money in his? How much ought you to lend him? When ought you to lend him? Now, or to-morrow, or next month? And for how long a time? It is evident, that no general rule can be laid down, by which a precise answer can, in all cases, be given to any of these questions. The difference between his character and yours, between his circumstances and yours, may be such, that you may be perfectly grateful, and justly refuse to lend him a halfpenny: and, on the contrary, you may be willing to lend, or even to give him ten times the sum which he lent you, and yet justly be accused of the blackest ingratitude, and of not having fulfilled the hundredth part of the obligation you lie under. As the duties of gratitude, however, are perhaps the most sacred of all those which the beneficent virtues prescribe to us, so the general rules which determine them are, as I said before, the most accurate. Those which ascertain the actions required by friendship, humanity, hospitality, generosity, are still more vague and indeterminate.

Smith’s argument is that general rules for ethical behavior are usually not that useful. We cannot regulate our conduct by general rules. Instead, he suggests that achieving virtue depends on making good decisions in conditions of uncertainty.

A requirement for this kind of thinking is a belief in free will and a capacity for a high degree of self-reflection about one’s actions and how they are or may be perceived by others. The aim of acting virtuously is human flourishing, which will be variously defined depending on the circumstances that an individual perceives. Passing judgment on another’s virtue is often difficult because we do not see the circumstances as they see them. Hence, Smith and other virtue ethicists often advocate human liberty. And yet it should be acknowledged that the virtues can be described, in their description is a key to their achievement, and in understanding how to achieve virtue our capacity for judgment increases. If we are actors making choices we need to know what it is we are choosing about.

There is a long history of describing the virtues, and Part II of this post will describe the four cardinal virtues while Part III will describe the three theological virtues.

(This article was cross-posted at www.omninerd.com).

Another Great Battle

2009-07-23T23:21:00.005-05:00

How can anyone who speaks a Western tongue, especially those among us who purport to be educated, afford not to study philosophy? I ask you! I implore you! Quo vadis? Whither goest thou without any understanding of whence we have come and who we are? And this is to say nothing of where we hope to go. In the works of Voltaire, we find a reference to a letter from Henry IV, the King of France, to an ill-knighted person by the name of Crillon, who, most unfortunately, arrived after a great battle had been fought. To the tardy Crillon, Henry IV wrote: "Hang yourself, brave Crillon! We fought at Arques, and you were not there."

We stand today on the edge of another great battle, that between humanistic learning in our nation and in our universities on the one hand, and the shallow, opportunistic, and personally aggrandizing appeal to the bottom-line principle of sheerly economic accountability on the other hand. Unlike Crillon, I plan to be at this battle and I trust that you will do likewise, for to do less is to abandon all that is distinctively human. I tell this to our children and to my students. I ask them to pass the message to their children and to their students. Philistines and purveyors of the shallow are everywhere. They pervade the university as well as the marketplace. It is our task to sustain and celebrate the wisdom of the past on behalf of our obligation to make possible the wisdom of the present. More than seventy years ago, William James said that philosophy bakes no bread. True enough, nor does it build bridges or clone cells. Yet a society that only bakes bread, builds bridges, and clones cells is a society that has failed to realize its deepest mission. The ancients knew well that time will seize us, in time. Our task is to think deeply about the most quixotic of all cosmic events, namely, the utterly transient yet powerful existence of a human life. Three millennia of philosophical speculation have addressed that paradox. And it is to that same ambivalence between power and fragility that we address ourselves once again. Ultimate conclusions are beyond our reach, but the quality of our endeavor is a gauge of the worthiness of our cause. Those of us who have bartered the present for a paradisiacal future, much less a career, have missed the drama of the obvious. Philosophy teaches us that every day, everyone has access to the depth of being human. We should not await salvation while the parade passes by. The nectar of a guaranteed human future is illusory and the height of self-deception. Our death is imminent. Philosophy sanctifies our reflective effort to ask why and, above all, philosophy makes an effort to tell the truth. In our time, what could be a more outlandish and coveted activity?
-John J. McDermott, "The Cultural Immortality of Philosophy"

Moon Rhetoric

2009-07-20T22:09:00.006-05:00

20 July 2009 is, of course, the fortieth anniversary of the lunar landing. It's a fitting day to look at the rhetorical leadership of President Kennedy. On 25 May 1961 (shout-out for Amy Gore's birthday), Kennedy delivered a speech arguing for a push to the moon before the end of the decade of the sixties. In the speech above, Kennedy clarifies and hones that argument, 12 September 1962, at Rice Stadium in Houston, Texas.

In the opening of the speech, Kennedy presents a condensed stadial theory to describe the development of human technologies related to learning, progress, and the invention of transportation. This theory is presented to inoculate listeners from the naysayers and Eeyores among us who would advise caution and safety over risk-taking and adventure. It is rhetorically astute that Kennedy presents the theory in a condensed form to hold the audience's attention and to keep them focused on the question of our immediate readiness for such a mission.

Man in his quest for knowledge is determined and cannot be deterred. The exploration of space will go ahead whether we join it or not.

Kennedy places repeated emphasis on the importance of learning and knowledge that the mission to the moon serves. This is appropriate, of course, because he is delivering the speech at a university, but it is significant for another reason, which is that by speaking about the advantages of knowledge in deliberate contrast to an effort to seek military advantage, Kennedy shows himself a true liberal.

For the eyes of the world now look into space, to the moon and the planets beyond.

First and foremost, this line is important because it is an echo of one of the most crucial lines in American rhetorical discourse. That line was spoken by earlier adventurers and explorers who were willing to leave their homes and homeland to venture into new territory: John Winthrop on the Arbella announced to the first settlers of Massachusetts Bay Colony that the eyes of the whole world are upon us. Fitting that the line should be echoed by a Massachusetts man. Fitting, too, because Kennedy shifts attention from America as promised land to America as world leader in a quest to explore space and to learn from our vast environment.

We have vowed that we shall not see it governed by a hostile flag of conquest, but by a banner of freedom and peace. We have vowed that we shall not see space filled with weapons of mass destruction, but with instruments of knowledge and understanding. Yet the vows of this nation can only be fulfilled if we in this nation are first, and, therefore, we intend to be first.

This powerful statement points again toward a pursuit of knowledge in contrast to a pursuit of warmongering or the arms race. I can't help but think of all the talk of WMD in the war on terror when I read this line, or Mr. Reagan's push for a Star Wars system to protect us from Soviet missiles - in direct opposition to the leadership Mr. Kennedy shows of pursuing peace, knowledge, and understanding. Of course I am aware that Mr. Kennedy's record on WMD is far from flawless in the sense that he contemplated their use and allowed them to become the cause of major incident. Nevertheless, contradictions and dissembling notwithstanding, I can't help but want to get in line behind a desire to explore space for knowledge and understanding rather than for the purpose of putting armaments in the sky. The contrast in leadership is worth noting. I also wonder in passing if anyone has ever done a study of the origins of the phrase "weapons of mass destruction." I was a bit surprised to find that phrasing in this speech.

Another important element of the speech is the recurring theme of competition. The historian David McCullough has noted the importance of rivals in history, for they play an essential role in driving individuals to accomplish great things and in shaping them and providing them motivation. The rival, and of course it is mentioned and criticized, is the Soviet Union. I can't help but think that we should thank the USSR for helping us accomplish our goal to walk on the moon before the end of the decade of the sixties.

What is worth mentioning is the fact that Mr. Kennedy repeatedly refers to rivalries and motivation using metaphors drawn from the world of sport. "Why does Rice play Texas?," is a brilliant line - for the occasion, of course, as it draws the most applause, but also because I think it sends an implicit message to the Soviet Union that the USA is capable of thinking of our own rivalry in a sportsmanlike way. Again, he could have chosen military metaphors, or some other more aggressive way to express himself, but indeed he did not. I think that is to his credit (and probably to Ted Sorensen's, too).

A few more things worth mentioning:

*Mr. Kennedy's excellent use of clear examples, like 10,000 automobiles with their accelerators to the floor.

*Mr. Kennedy's clapping of his hands for emphasis as he nears the conclusion - as if to encourage a round of applause, but also to draw the audience toward assenting to the plan.

*Mr. Kennedy's reference to the heat of September days in Texas really get the audience excited. If you've lived in Texas, you know what he means.

In conclusion, it's clear to me that the speech shows considerable leadership in the push to explore space and to land a man on the moon. It would be nice if our readers, if there be any, could comment on their thoughts about JFK's speech. I would be particularly interested in hearing from those who might remember Kennedy's moon rhetoric or who might be willing to share their memories of the day humans walked on the moon.

(A copy of this essay was cross-posted at www.omninerd.com.)

Attitudes Toward Money

2009-07-06T13:33:00.006-05:00

I recently had a piece published in the Kenneth Burke Journal. Here is the abstract:

Attitudes toward the pecuniary are peculiar. One reason we misunderstand money is because it defines and answers to both our animal nature (necessity) and our symbolic nature (property). In this paper I trace the genealogy of Kenneth Burke’s attitudes toward money in the “Epilogue: Prologue in Heaven” to show how Burke’s logological approach toward money is original and in tension with claims offered by competing, economic attitudes toward money. Money sits forever at the nexus of our animal and symbolic nature because it simultaneously holds the place of value and signifies what we value. By stressing animal limits and symbolic infinity, Burke invites us to ponder the extent of human cooperation and the boundaries of human strivings. As attitudes, these invitations reveal that Burke wanted to re-appropriate the money symbol to the realm of logology and religion – away from capitalism – to exhibit the potential justice at the heart of human experience. That justice, however, only inheres so long as the tension between animal and symbol is respected in our pursuit of needs through symbolic action. Burke strings the tension between animal and symbol along the lines of a conversation between The Lord and Satan. Along the way he shows us a Lord sympathetic to our money crimes as well as all others and a loyal opposition that laughs at our infirmities. In this way, Burke works to redeem human commerce from its worst propensities by showing its relationship to the Word.

You can read the complete article here. What follows is some background on Kenneth Burke that may be useful before reading:

Kenneth Burke was the most influential literary and rhetorical critic of the 20C. He was an American thinker through and through, influenced strongly by William James and Thorstein Veblen, but also Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, and Aristotle. He is best known for his invention of the Pentad, a way of seeing texts (and the world) using a model derived from the theatre. The Pentad is after the deepest understanding of human motives possible. Burke is after Yes, No, and Maybe, frames of acceptance, rejection, and acceptance/rejection. As Jim Aune taught me, the Pentad is Burke's way of looking at the world from a God's eye view. Burke is searching for a Grammar and a Rhetoric of Motives, a theory that captures how symbols motivate human being(s). The Pentad is best thought of as a reworking of classical rhetoric's theory of the topics (topoi) with a dramatic dimension. Every investigation of human motive, if it wants to be as complex as human motive, must see all five of the following at once as well as recognize how ratios between the five elements can develop to further explain motive. Each of the elements corresponds to a particular philosophy and the parts of a dramatic story.

1. ACT: What is being done? Realism: plot.
2. SCENE: What is the context? Determinism: spectacle.
3. AGENT: Who is doing? Idealism: character.
4. AGENCY: What is it good for? Pragmatism: diction.
5. PURPOSE: What are human beings striving for? Mysticism: thought.

In addition to the Pentad as a way of explaining human motive, KB presented a corresponding "Definition of Man," from an essay of the same name that defines man as:

1. Symbol using animals, implying that much of our reality is propped up symbolically. Symbol-use should contain no temptation for flattery because it includes symbol misuse.

2. Inventor of the negative: there are no negatives in nature. Everything in nature simply is what it is.

3. Separated from our natural condition by instruments of our own making.

4. Goaded by a spirit of hierarchy, moved by a sense of Order. One might say obsessed by order. Add to this, language is intrinsically hortatory (see Richard Weaver's essay, "Language is Sermonic").

5. Rotten with perfection. The goadings of hierarchy with which we poke one another, instead of actually perfecting us, are often a source of our greatest, most glaring imperfections.

KB's interest in combining complex analysis of human motives within the broad context of human affairs (what he called the "human barnyard") sprang from his experience as a youthful intellectual during the Great Depression. His earliest works, including Counter-Statement, Permanence & Change, and Attitudes Toward History exemplify a deep interest in symbols and the way symbols build systems of significance.

Because his project was begun in the midst of the Great Depression, KB was often preoccupied by the money symbol. My piece looks at money as a symbol, a symbol of symbols, and how it both distracts from and brings us to God (the Idea of Order). It examines Burke's preoccupation with money in a dialog he wrote between The Lord and Satan that appears as an epilogue or post-conclusion at the end of his book The Rhetoric of Religion. The "Epilogue: Prologue in Heaven," is an imagined conversation between The Lord and Satan that takes place before the world was created. I am looking for understanding of money as a symbol, a symbol of symbols, and how it both distracts from and brings us to God (the Idea of Order).

In some ways I mimic Burke's writing style, which some may find enlightening and others baffling. One critic, Joseph Frank, said, "The Rhetoric of Religion, like everything else that Mr. Burke has written, is highly original, brilliantly stimulating, infinitely suggestive, and ultimately baffling."

Summer Reading

2009-07-02T22:41:00.003-05:00

It has been a long, long time since I bought books. For me, that doesn't mean I haven't bought an occasional book or two here and there over the last six months. However, it has been months since I placed a big order, you know, ten or more books at a time through Barnes & Noble. The reason I've been holding off was that I've been drafting a book of my own and didn't have the sort of time I wanted to devote to reading.

So there I was at Barnes & Noble this afternoon to pick up a special order that arrived a few days ago. My wont is to browse the magazines for a few minutes, Italian soda in hand, and then pick up the books I ordered and spend an hour or two in the store perusing my soon to be acquisitions. I was chatting with one of the booksellers who was explaining to me that they were moving all the book sections around to different places because the economy. That's what she said. Apparently, what this means in practical terms is that philosophy is given a much smaller section by the bathrooms and the number of Bibles has exploded exponentially. It also means that more of the books I want to read have to be special ordered (which I'm used to) and pre-paid (which I despise). It's not that I mind buying books via the internet or pre-paying, but I very much prefer the fun of picking my books up at the store in person, on the rare occasions that I order brand new books, so as to while away an afternoon and enjoy a soda.

I spent the best part of tonight reading widely among them. I'm in the habit of reading many books at a time. Kathy thinks I'm crazy for this and doesn't understand how I can follow everything that's going on at once. I think of my books as friends with whom I'm having a conversation, with the lovely benefit that I can shut them off at any time or pick up where we left off even if I'm less than presentable or whenever it's convenient for me.

Anyway, here's a list of what I bought today, in no particular order:

1. John Lukacs, Last Rites (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2009). I confess that I am enamored of Lukacs. I think he's rather brilliant. I've read a lot of his work, and unfortunately the first part of this one seems a little repetitive, but there were a few gems, including:

*Knowledge, neither "objective" nor "subjective," is always personal. Not individual: personal. The concept of the "individual" has been one of the essential misconceptions of political liberalism. Every human being is unique: but he does not exist alone.

*It took me, an antimaterialist idealist, perhaps forty or fifty years to recognize, suddenly, that people do not have ideas: they choose them.

*History is larger than science, since science is a part of history and not the other way around. First came nature, then came man, and then the science of nature. No scientists, no "science."

A great introduction to Lukacs' work is his recent essay in the American Scholar.

2. G.K. Chesterton, What's Wrong with the World. This was recommended to me by Philip Blond (not personally, but still). See this clip. The other day I read Hilaire Belloc's The Servile State, which I enjoyed very much. I understand that he and Chesterton share a theory about the economy known as distributism. I think I share it, too, although I don't know how much energy I really have for a return to fiefdoms.

3. Moses Maimonides, A Guide for the Perplexed. I have no idea when I'm going to have time to read this enormous book, but I hope I do. I read the first few chapters and it whetted my appetite for his scriptural interpretations.

4. Hesiod, Theogony, Works & Days, and Testimonia, Edited and Translated by Glenn W. Most (Cambride & London: Harvard University Press, 2006). I can't really remember why I ordered this book, but I think it has something to do with the titles of the works - all concepts I'm interested in - and my understanding that Works & Days is an early argument for the fact that hard work is somehow connected to justice.

5. Carlo Ginzburg, The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, trans. John and Anne Tedeschi (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983). Ginzburg's The Cheese and the Worms is one of my all time favorite books. Ever. Aune said this one measures up well with that one. 'nuff said.

6. Slavoj Zizek and John Milbank, The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009). This book is much bigger than I thought it was: tiny print and 303 pages. I like the idea of a postmodern atheist and a theologian debating God, and the one saying to the other: "in my atheism, I am more Christian than Milbank." At first, that intrigued me, but now I think it's a rather stupid thing to say. I hope I have time to read it soon.

7. Mark C. Taylor, Confidence Games: Money and Markets in a World Without Redemption (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 2004). I really should've read this sooner. I thoroughly enjoyed the Preface and the Introduction. The Preface is more the kind of writing I like, personal and direct. I don't believe we're in a world without redemption, but I am provoked by the connections Taylor promises to draw between markets and religion:

In retrospect, it is clear that God did not simply disappear but was reborn as the market. In contemporary society, the market has become God in more than a trivial sense. The terms many economists and analysts use to describe the market implicitly suggest language once reserved for God: the market is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent. Since the market knows best, it should be allowed to operate according to its own principles with minimal interference from humans, whose knowledge is unavoidably limited.

Funny, not a lot of people are talking about markets that way now, but still, it's a critique of the dominant theology of the day.

8. John Milbank, The Future of Love: Essays in Political Theology (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2009). Wow, now you don't see a lot of books published in Oregon. Anyway, I'm excited to read the first essay: Divine Logos and Human Communication.

9 & 10. Volumes II and III of Philip Rieff's trilogy Sacred Order/Social Order: The Crisis of the Officer Class: The Decline of the Tragic Sensibility and The Jew of Culture: Freud, Moses, Modernity, both published by the University of Virginia Press. Volume I was a rare treat, indeed. If these are half as good . . .

11. John D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997). Not only did I get to meet Caputo and hear him speak in May, but this book was recommended by Adam as one of the best books he'd ever read.

When I placed the order a few weeks back I picked up The Philosopher's Quarrel, about Hume and Rousseau, David Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature, and Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time. I will have no shortage of new things to read this summer. I'm sure I won't tackle all of these, or perhaps even most of them, before school starts in the fall. The good thing is I have no compunction about unread books on my shelves. It's a sign of days ahead, of hope, and of a longing for leisure. May you have many days of reading pleasure this summer is my prayer.

Death in the First Week of Summer

2009-06-27T17:25:00.006-05:00

Kathy's Great Aunt, Auntie Lois passed away this week. She and the children took off to San Diego yesterday for the funeral. I, unfortunately, have been left behind to finish my summer class and to continue digging. In any event, I thought I would post a short piece I wrote about Lois to be included in the program for her funeral:

Lois Clegg Crocker was born June 21, 1927, in Strawberry, Utah, to Earvin and Ethel Clegg. At a young age, Lois moved to southern California to support herself. It was there that Lois married William Fredrick Crocker on February 21, 1953, in a double wedding with Jim and Fern Crocker. For 38 years, Lois worked for the Pacific Telephone Company. She was a member of the Red Hat Society. Among her many joys was traveling the world over, including Europe, Central America, Russia, China, and Egypt, as well as extensive travel in North America, visiting all 50 states and always seeing family along the way. Her greatest joy was spending time with others. She especially loved camping on the California coast with her extended family. She is adored by hundreds as a special Auntie, and was active all her life in caring for children, quilting, and making gifts for others. She will long be remembered for her love of company, and was surrounded by loved ones when she passed through the veil on June 23, 2009, in La Mesa, California.

I can elaborate: the double wedding occurred because Lois married Bill, and her sister Fern married Bill's brother, Jim. The two sisters and two brothers lived next door to each other in La Mesa, CA, about three blocks from where Kathy grew up. Lois was very close to all of us and will surely be missed.

In addition to Lois's passing, I had the opportunity of speaking at a funeral this week, as a member of my ward passed on. I think the sermon was well received and my friend Matt Faerber, one of our local musical geniuses, sang "I Know that My Redeemer Lives." My cousins Tina and Tami lost their grandfather this week, may he rest in peace, and Tina's dog also died this week. I note today is the 165th anniversary of the martyrdom of the Prophet Joseph. The separation because of death is sad, but I take joy in the possibilities of life, and that eternal. Even still, it is well to remember.

Stoic Joy

2009-06-27T16:00:00.002-05:00

One of the more interesting books I've read this year is William B. Irvine's A Guide to the Good Life: {The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy}. I picked it up the same weekend I read Seneca's Life is Short. What Irvine is after is twofold: first, a critique of mostly academic philosophers who are unwilling to apply their philosophy to their everyday life, and, second, an argument in favor of adopting Stoicism as a way of life.

One of the reasons I was attracted to studying rhetoric is because I think of rhetorical studies as applied philosophy. I mean, communication problems are obviously ever-present and pressing. Asking myself how to deliver a good speech or write a good letter is, for me, a philosophical and practical query. Asking how delivering a good speech or writing a good letter is connected to living a good life seems natural to me. Irvine thinks everyone would be a whole lot happier if they adopted for themselves a philosophy of life. He argues, for example, that what makes Socrates a great philosopher is not his arguments or conclusions, but "the extent to which he allowed his way of life to be affected by his philosophical speculations . . . integrating his theoretical and speculative concerns into the context of his daily activities." (19) For me, carrying his first point was easy.

As for his argument about Stoicism I can only say, "Almost thou persuadest me to be a Stoic." For the most part, Irvine is ecumenical in his recommendation of Stoicism, arguing that there is no conflict between Stoicism and other religious or philosophical ideas. He pursues Stoic joy as guidance toward living well, as a paradoxical recipe for happiness. Stoicism is a pursuit of virtue for greater tranquility and happiness, and some psychological practices of Stoicism that are quite instructive are:

I. Negative Visualization. This follows from Seneca's notion that misfortune weighs most heavily on those who "expect nothing but good fortune." (65) Therefore, a good practice to adopt is to meditate occasionally on what the worst is that could happen. To ponder how we would feel and what we would do in such catastrophe.

We need to keep firmly in mind that everything we value and the people we love will someday be lost to us. If nothing else, our own death will deprive us of them. More generally, we should keep in mind that any human activity that cannot be carried on indefinitely must have a final occurence. There will be - or already has been! - a last time in your life that you brush your teeth, cut your hair, drive a car, mow the lawn, or play hopscotch. There will be a last time you hear the sound of snow falling, watch the moon rise, smell popcorn, feel the warmth of a child falling asleep in your arms, or make love. You will someday eat your last meal, and soon thereafter you will take your last breath.

Sometimes the world gives us advance notice that we are about to do something for the last time. We might, for example, eat at a favorite restaurant the night before it is scheduled to close, or we might kiss a lover who is forced by circumstances to move to a distant part of the globe, presumably forever. Previously, when we thought we could repeat them at will, a meal at this restaurant or a kiss shared with our lover might have been unremarkable. But now that we know they cannot be repeated, they will likely become extraordinary events: The meal will be the best we ever had at the restaurant, and the parting kiss will be one of the most intensely bittersweet experiences life has to offer.

By contemplating the impermanence of everything in the world, we are forced to recognize that every time we do something could be the last time we do it, and this recognition can invest the things we do with a significance and intensity that would otherwise be absent. We will no longer sleepwalk through our life. Some people, I realize, will find it depressing or even morbid to contemplate our impermanence. I am nevertheless convinced that the only way we can be truly alive is if we make it our business periodically to entertain such thoughts. (83-84)

II. The Dichotomy of Control. According to Epictetus, a Stoic sage, we must decide to concern ourselves with things external to us or things internal to us. Most people focus on and blame externalities, but the Stoic will look "for all benefit and harm to come from himself." In fact, he will give up external rewards offered by the world in order to gain "tranquility, freedom, and calm."

One of the things we quickly realize when we think about internal problems is that there are some things over which we have control and some things over which we have no control. Irvine breaks this down further. There are:

1. Things over which we have complete control (e.g., the goals we set for ourselves, the values we form).

2. Things over which we have no control at all (e.g., whether the sun will rise tomorrow).

3. Things over which we have some but not complete control (e.g., whether we win a basketball game).

According to Epictetus, we should concern ourselves with 1, and not be concerned with 2, and should be careful to internalize the goals we form with respect to 3.

III. Fatalism. "According to Seneca, we should offer ourselves to fate, inasmuch as "it is a great consolation that it is together with the universe we are swept along. . . . If we want our life to go well, Epictetus says, we should, rather than wanting events to conform to our desires, make our desires conform to events; we should, in other words, want events "to happen as they do happen." (102) Irvine's treatment of contemporary psychological therapy on this point is quite fascinating (see pages 213-220).

IV. Self-Denial. Besides negative visualization, "Besides contemplating bad things happening, we should sometimes live as if they had happened. In particular, instead of merely thinking about what it would be like to lose our wealth, we should periodically "practice poverty": We should, that is, content ourselves with "the scantiest and cheapest fare" and with "coarse and rough dress." (110)

"In other words, voluntary discomfort can be thought of as a kind of vaccine: By exposing ourselves to a small amount of a weakened virus now, we create in ourselves an immunity that will protect us from a debilitating illness in the future." (112) The goal is to avoid becoming a puppet or slave to pleasure; pains and pleasures have the power to overwhelm our rational capacity if we are not on our guard. ". . . If we coddle ourselves, if we allow ourselves to be corrupted by pleasure, nothing will seem bearable to us, and the reason things will seem unbearable is not because they are hard but because we are soft." (161)

V. Meditation. Seneca advises periodical meditation on the events of daily living. We have to take stock of ourselves and our daily battle with ailments, temptations, pleasures, &c.

Irvine then takes these five Stoic Psychological Techniques and reviews how the Stoics advised they be applied to daily living. The last section of the book is Irvine's attempt to apply them in his own life over the past ten years or so. It's interesting that he got the idea for living Stoically and writing this book from his reading of Tom Wolfe's A Man in Full, which is a pretty cool novel. The end of the book is a tad long, but hearing a philosopher actually talk about his own life, experiences, and challenges is a nice change of pace. The best thing about the book, though, are the quotations of Stoic philosophers. Indeed, even Irvine suggests reading them instead of him . . .

The Big Dig

2009-06-02T21:45:00.000-05:00

For those in the know, the big dig has commenced.

War: in memoriam

2009-05-27T16:45:00.008-05:00

As I said, I spent my free time reading Dickens on Monday. Still, I wanted to say something about war. This is prompted in part by a posting (it's PG-13, Ma) at The Rosewater Chronicles about war, but also by a sense of the meaning of Memorial Day. Like Josh, I hate war. I have already said, as I say now, that love is stronger than hate and that it will prevail. And I should add that I love peace more so than I hate war. Yet as I reflected on Josh's acid inspired argument and watched Eisenhower's speech, I couldn't help but reflect on the fact that life, love, and war are complicated.

Some of the operational enthymemes of Eisenhower's speech resonated very strongly with me. How we use our power for world peace and human betterment, liberty, dignity, and integrity, is more important than how much power we have or do not have. When millions of Americans' daily work and preoccupation is arms manufacturing and war strategizing we are on the wrong track. The immense arms industry has economic, political, and spiritual effects which must not be underestimated. The military-industrial complex invades the whole of human life, especially commodifying and dominating the university. Thus, Eisenhower: " . . . a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity." We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren. We must be solvent. We must be a confederation of equals. Peace derives from mutual respect and love. Watch the whole thing:

And part 2:

Peace comes from love and mutual respect. Repeat the refrain. It's certainly possible to imagine a world without war, or a world at peace. At the same time, I remember a great argument with one of my colleagues who claims to be a pacifist. I asked if he really wouldn't use violence to defend his children. He insisted he wouldn't. I didn't believe him then, and I don't believe him now.

I think two paintings by Jacques Louis David point us in the direction of a world at peace, but manage, too, to capture the ambiguity and irony at the heart of human experience. The first painting, The Oath of the Horatii, was painted to depict men willing to lay down their lives for the city. The painting had considerable currency in the years building up to the French Revolution as representing the necessity of defending republican freedom. The father in the center, holding up the swords, is essentially inviting his triplets to defend Rome. The triplets are offering their assent whilst the women weep.

David's next major work, The Lictors Bring to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons, depicts the opposite and inevitable result of the scene above. It is Brutus receiving the return of his sons from war. Once again the father is at the center of the picture while the women mourn. Actually, they hide their faces and cry out with sadness while their children clutch their breasts. The sons return home, in the upper left hand corner, dead.

These scenes capture the heartache and hell of war, but at the same time they reinforce the fact that out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made. No perfect peace; No, thank heavens, total war - at least not yet. And so it goes. And so I hope it always goes on the second count. Yet I think we have to find a way to honor courage and to cultivate a willingness to stand up for what's right - even at the cost of our very lives - even as I recognize that things are not always that simple. The dream of republican courage and of perfect peace are noble.

Still, if I had to choose I'd go for perfect peace. Yesterday I read the original Mother's Day proclamation by Julia Ward Howe. It was tacked to one of the walls at UMD. I'm not sure if it was posted in memory of the recent Mother's Day or to honor Memorial Day, but it's a fitting tribute for both.

Arise, then, women of this day!
Arise, all women who have hearts,
Whether our baptism be of water or of tears!

Say firmly:
"We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies,
Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.
We, the women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country
To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs."

From the bosom of the devastated Earth a voice goes up with our own.
It says: "Disarm! Disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance of justice."
Blood does not wipe out dishonor, nor violence indicate possession.
As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil at the summons of war,
Let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of counsel.

Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.
Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means
Whereby the great human family can live in peace,
Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar,
But of God.

In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask
That a general congress of women without limit of nationality
May be appointed and held at someplace deemed most convenient
And at the earliest period consistent with its objects,
To promote the alliance of the different nationalities,
The amicable settlement of international questions,
The great and general interests of peace.

Chasing your Hat

2009-05-27T16:29:00.002-05:00

When I was in high school I read A Tale of Two Cities and loved it. I've tried to get back to Dickens a few times since, but on Memorial Day is when I finally got into him. I decided to read The Pickwick Papers, partly because we have a pub in Duluth called The Pickwick and partly because it is Dickens early work and I have a strange compulsion that makes me want to read authors in order. It's brill. Anyway, in addition to a number of wonderful short stories interspersed with an engaging narrative I came across this nugget:

There are very few moments in a man's existence when he experiences so much ludicrous distress, or meets with so little charitable commiseration, as when he is in pursuit of his own hat. A vast deal of coolness, and a peculiar degree of judgment, are requisite in catching a hat. A man must not be precipitate, or he runs over it; he must not rush into the opposite extreme, or he loses it altogether. The best way is, to keep gently up with the object of pursuit, to be wary and cautious, to watch your opportunity well, get gradually before it, then make a rapid dive, seize it by the crown, and stick it firmly on your head: smiling pleasantly all the time, as if you thought it as good a joke as anybody else.

Texas Tales

2009-05-20T23:00:00.006-05:00

I guess I'm in a Texas state of mind today, but I got a real hearty laugh out of two quotes I read today. These might be more appropriate for a twitter page, but here goes:

When a Republican critic called her 'Tom Delay in a skirt,' Nancy Pelosi just smiled, her daughter says, and commented, 'What a disturbing image.'
- Tina Brown, Newsweek

The second is from a book by Loren Eiseley. I just discovered Eiseley's work today, but the first chapter of All the Strange Hours was quite a read. If you haven't lived in Texas, you might not get it:

I stood on the street of that damn Texas town, and the sign on the door before me read:

Anybody who objects to the sight of
Nude People Making Love
doesn't belong in here.
Anything San Francisco can do
we can do better.

Couldn't they ever stop playing chicken in Texas?

That last line just kills me. Will they ever stop playing chicken in Texas? I wonder. I doubt it.

Anyway, this last is thrown in for good measure. It made me laugh when I first heard it whilst I was back in Texas . . .

In an April 2005 address to the worldwide membership of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, then-94-year-old Gordon B. Hinckley said that he'd never dreamed he would live so long. "My life reminds me of a sign that hung by a rusty staple to a run-down barbed-wire fence in Texas," Hinckley said. "It read, 'Burned out by drought. Drowned out by flood waters. Et out by jackrabbits. Sold out by sheriff. Still here!'"

A Letter on MSH

2009-05-14T23:14:00.002-05:00

We must be especially careful in choosing people, and deciding whether they are worth devoting a part of our lives to them . . . - Seneca

When an academic conference opens with a shiny penny who was once a baag-street boy, a seven foot tall Mormon Buddha, and the fleshiness of reason it's off to a great start. Such was the opening of the third annual Mormon Scholars in the Humanities conference held at Aspen Grove, just up the mountain from Robert Redford's Sundance. The conference was one of the most exciting of my academic life, in part because we were led by an environmental Jedi knight in one George Handley. (Don't tell me, George, I'm the first to observe your resemblance to Luke Skywalker.) The other thing I liked about this conference is that the organization is new enough so that even though I missed the first two conferences I felt like I didn't join the conversation too late. What's more, this conference was small, as are all the best, and structured for a maximum amount of discussion.

The first two presentations set us on a promising trajectory. Jonathon Penny invited us to a theology of reading rooted in a hermeneutic of love - to be a reading Christ. Adam Miller gave us a Buddhist aphorism about how often we get caught up in theological questions about the origin and age of the universe, or the extent of our agency or God's, or the afterlife . . . and in the meantime we die. Miller's claim is that we need to bend our efforts toward reading and practicing charity (including in and through our theology). I enjoyed both of these presentations immensely, but I might quibble with the notion of theology as a reading. What I have in mind is Bother Brigham at the tabernacle declaring that the Bible, the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants, and the Pearl of Great Price are nothing compared to the living oracles of God. Thus, while it is crucial to concentrate on essential charity, yes, for me this necessitates theology as a map of listening. In particular, a map of listening to the word of God as written on the fleshy tablets of the heart. As soon as we think and talk of the word of God typographically we'd better call the paramedics (Walter Ong, anyone?); the breath and spirit give life. But this is a small quibble which I didn't articulate well last Friday. I'm all for a reading theology, but living speech is all the rage, and I think crucial particularly for any discussion of LDS theology.

Jim Faulconer's presentation on the fleshiness of reason spoke of theology as a divine eros - made for a desiring being - not merely a thinking, reading, or doubting being - but a being who has a tongue and ears and a heart and a brain. Affect comes before effect, rightly, for Jim and Levinas. After Jim was done speaking I wanted to read more Levinas. I should also like to read and hear more Faulconer.

Perhaps my favorite presentation of the weekend was Sam Brown's on the origins of Mormonism in an 18C death culture wherein was manifested a powerful desire to speak from the dead. Joseph Smith Jr.'s milieu was preoccupied with speech from out of the grave. This illuminated my discoveries the day before in the SLC cemetery (see below) as well as my desires to speak well . . . because . . . in the meantime . . . wait for it . . . we die.

A few key points from Sam's discussion (which I may be butchering):

- Grant Hardy's argument that the Book of Mormon is essentially a midrash on Isaiah.
- Hebrews 11:4 - Abel being dead yet speaketh - and how you might ask does Paul know? Joseph said . . . because Abel talked to Paul. Duh! This very same thing is happening to Joseph all the time - he speaks to God; to Paul; to Moses; to Elias; Elijah; John called Baptist; Peter; James; John; &c., &c. It's basic for Joseph that the dead speak.
- The order of the family tree anticipates temporal collapse.
- Paul is supposed to be dead, but Joseph is talking to him. What's that Emerson says? A true teacher . . . shows that God is, not was; God speaketh, not spake.

Letting the dead speak was followed by Alan Goff's insights about the importance of putting history and literature back together as branches on the same tree. This point was illustrated well with a number of scriptural examples showing the persistence and insight of literary themes. He concluded with the claim that we have not been adequate readers of the Book of Mormon and that it is vastly more sophisticated than we are.

Friday evening was topped off with a keynote address by John D. Caputo, "On Making a Covenant with the Impossible: A Postmodern Approach to Religion and Its Place in the University." Two claims of this address were 1. Theology belongs properly to the humanities. 2. Secularism asked us to have more faith in reason. The world had enough of the divine right of kings and of telling Galileo that he can't say what he saw in his telescope. And yet it is clear that the Enlightenment has done all the good it's giong to do.

I pair-a-phrase: For Caputo God is the possibility of the impossible, and religion is a covenant with the impossible. Is not faith, he asks, most important when things start to look unbelievable? Just when we've come up against the unbelievable we put on faith in God - or in something - God knows what. When the experts of the possible have fled the scene the name of God returns. Or rather, we run looking for it. St. Paul's hope against hope is a perfect deconstructive formula. The conclusion was for greater liberty of inquiry in the academy. It is not religion we need less of in schools, but confesssional authority to take certain questions off the table. And, let us not forget, religion always has political consequences. If there is something askew in our politics it is because of skewed assumptions in our theology.

I could go on for hours and hours, but haven't the time or audience. The papers really felt like they kept getting better. Handley's argument about the need for religion in discussions of climate change because religion speaks in imperative terms was thrilling. As were presentations on picturing the vices, Charles Taylor, Hemmingway, Jonathan Edwards' Faithful Narrative, and the believing critic.

After my presentation John Armstrong said to me, "I didn't even know you existed." I took this as his expression of pleasant surprise at their being another interested in political philosophy, Plato, &c. I didn't even know he existed either, but I'm glad I do. Moreover, I'm glad MSH exists. The best things to me about the conference were that so many participants are deeply versed in the Scriptures, were articulate and self-aware in their pursuit of knowledge, and immensely friendly, knowledgable, and kind. I felt like I had found a new scholarly home and I felt ready to devote a part of my life to them . . . even if it takes me awhile to start speaking up.

Friends - Salt Lake City

2009-05-11T23:55:00.003-05:00

I arrived in SLC last Wednesday at 11am. My sister Amy picked me up at the airport and we drove straight to Five Guys for a burger and fries. It was as good as I remember with John in DC a few years back. Amy then dropped me off at the Bountiful Temple where I was able to worship for a few hours in a grand and sublime setting. Following my session I was able to visit with the President and Matron, President and Sister Richards. It was wonderful to visit with them about our exciting days, "days never to be forgotten" in the England Manchester Mission. After visiting with them I felt like they had re-built me, perhaps without knowing it, although I doubt. President and Sister Richards are great builders, and I was renewed by being in their presence.

Amy and I then went to Temple Square where we enjoyed the free movie at the Joseph Smith Memorial Building. I thought to myself that the church finally made a movie about Joseph Smith worthy of the name. It is the best to my knowledge, and the first to quote his words directly throughout. The depiction of his wife Emma, too, was fantastic and whetted my appetite for the biography of her that I own.

Following the film we repaired to Buca de Beppo's - an excellent Italian restaurant - where Amy and I enjoyed some delicious pepperoni pizza. We joked that since we had Five Guys for lunch and pepperoni pizza for dinner that we ought to have dedicated the days festivities to Mike - an undying fan of both. Then we walked back to her house through Grove Park on a fine spring evening. I don't think the day could have been more wonderful.

On Thursday I slept late, but made my way to the Barnes & Noble at Gateway plaza - a swanky new outdoor mall in west Salt Lake. With my strawberry julius I made it through a few books on Stoic philosophy including most of Seneca's On the Shortness of Life which I managed to finish yesterday in Minneapolis. I recommend it to you with great eagerness - it is the kind of book that will change the way you think about the precious time you've been given.

At twelve thirty I met Cash at Crown Burger where we enjoyed some pastrami. We then had a second (for me) showing of the Joseph Smith movie. It got better with age. We then repaired to Brigham Young's grave where he is buried with a few of his wives and one son. Following our pilgrimage we toured the Conference Center. It is by far the best venue for artistic events in the American west. The most impressive thing about the place is the original art throughout, including a painting of Joseph in Prison by Jacques-Louis David, which is saying a lot considering the beautiful garden roof.

Cash and I had a few minutes to spare before dinner, which we spent in the Salt Lake cemetery. We aimed to find President Hinckley's headstone, but instead found those of Joseph F. Smith, Joseph Fielding Smith, James E. Talmage, Orson Pratt, and others. We were both excited to see James E. Talmage's headstone was engraved: Educator - Scientist - Apostle. Now how many places can you find that? We also noted that Elder Talmage's headstone had a quotation from himself. We joked about how awesome it would be to say something so profound that you were quoted on your own headstone. (More about this to follow.) My favorite was Orson Pratt's however, which noted that he was a scientist, astronomer, and apostle. His own epitaph was: "My body sleeps, but my testimony lives and shall endure forever."

After our time in the cemetery we met up with Amy, her friend Nick, and my old friend Darin at a Korean restaurant. Cash was kind enough to order for all of us as the menu was in Korean. He managed to order the best rice I have ever had in my life. What do they call that again, Cash? Mmmm . . . spicy goodness. Considering that most of us had never met one another before, dinner turned out quite well. We kept a good discussion going and all stuffed ourselves. After dinner we walked outside only to see the lights of a baseball stadium shining off the night sky. Such a lure cannot be resisted by Cash. We made it in time to get in free, stretch at the 7th inning, and watch the Salt Lake Bees get annihilated. All in all it was a wonderful evening. Darin, Cash, and I spent the wee hours of the night talking ourselves goofy. It was a wonderful day and all our dreams came true.

[For an account of my visit Friday and Saturday with MSH stay tuned.]

On Sunday morning I reunited with Darin for a wonderful Mother's Day. We had eggs and ham for breakfast - thanks Darin - and then sped away to the Mormon Tabernacle for Music & the Spoken Word. If you've never heard the Mormon Tabernacle Choir perform live you haven't lived. Every Sunday morning they do a free performance at half past nine. Seeing as it was Mother's Day the choir, together with the Salt Lake Orchestra, were in rare form, but the real treat came after the show. The historian David McCullough of John Adams fame was in attendance as he was the commencement speaker the day before at the University of Utah. In honor of he and his wife the choir sang "Battle Hymn of the Republic." I noticed from my seat that they were both deeply touched - as were we all - by the thrilling number. Then, as is tradition, the choir sang, "God Be With You 'Til We Meet Again." It was a powerful performance and I am moved reflecting on it now. A glorious day of rest.

Darin and I followed it up with a garden tour of Temple Square. We learned more than we ever thought we could about the architecture - not sure if that's the word - of gardens, how they are planned, executed, and renewed, &c. It was enlightening and I shall not look at trees or flower beds ever again with the same eye.

Following our garden tour we met up with Amy for lunch before I caught my plane. It was a thoroughly enjoyable and renewing weekend to meet up with so many friends. I cherish them all. My spirit was renewed by their presence, laughter, visages and voices.

Salty and Sweet

2009-04-21T21:23:00.002-05:00

This morning brought yet another stumbling block in my path toward professional advancement. I'm hoping, in time, that I can summon the patience and work to make this stumbling block into a stepping stone. Much of this anxiety immediately left me when upon my return home this evening I saw no less than ten children jumping on the trampoline in our backyard. Spring and frolic are an overdue thing in Minnesota.

Still, I chose to self-medicate tonight with some buttered popcorn. While popping the popcorn I thought of my good friend Cash. His favorite treat is popcorn. This thought reminded me of the moment when I knew he and I were going to be good friends.

It all started when Cash and his able and wonderful wife Marisa had invited my family and I to dinner. After dinner they asked us if we wanted some ice cream. Of course we said yes because ice cream is our favorite treat. Out came a very small scoop of ice cream in an even smaller clear glass bowl. You know, the kind of bowl in which you place chopped onions or parsley in preparation for cooking. Now, you have to understand that in the family I grew up in when you have ice cream it means you can easily down a half gallon between two or three people. So the shock of seeing ice cream in this small a quantity was not soon to leave me. Anyway, the second time they invited us over for dinner we retired to their living room. Again, Cash asked if we wanted some ice cream. I said, "That depends. Are you actually going to give us ice cream, or are you only going to tease us with a palate cleanser?" This brought about a good laugh and Cash's confession that he doesn't really like ice cream . . . which lead me to discover that he does like popcorn. And when I say he likes popcorn, I mean he likes it with a lot of butter . . . and not that stuff with water in it, either! Butter . . . the greasier the better.

Anyway, tonight after I had my buttered popcorn - some of which I spilled on to my favorite french cuff shirt . . . may the grease remedy work . . . I chased it down with a bowl of ice cream. I know, decadent, eh? I'll have to swim an extra few laps tomorrow. But I told that story to inquire about how it is that friendships develop. I mean, I understand that chance and good fortune seem to play some role, but perhaps, had I not mocked Cash's gift of ice cream or had he not reacted so positively than we might not be the friends we are. But, then again, I suppose that's only one possibility among the pluriverse.

Dreamy Scipio

2009-04-02T20:48:00.003-05:00

In these troublesome antics, we may even find it wise on occasion to adopt incongruous perspectives for the dwarfing of our impatience. We in cities rightly grow shrewd at appraising man-made institutions – but beyond these tiny concentration points of rhetoric and traffic, there lies the eternally unsolvable Enigma, the preposterous fact that both existence and nothingness are equally unthinkable. Our speculations may run the whole qualitative gamut, from play, through reverence, even to an occasional shiver of cold metaphysical dread – for always the Eternal Enigma is there, right on the edges of our metropolitan bickerings, stretching outward to interstellar infinity and inward to the depths of the mind. And in this staggering disproportion between man and no-man, there is no place for purely human boasts of grandeur, or for forgetting that men build their cultures by huddling together, nervously loquacious, at the edge of an abyss.

- Kenneth Burke, Permanence & Change

For men were brought into existence in order that they should inhabit the globe known as the earth, which you see here at the centre of this holy space. They have been endowed with souls made out of the everlasting fires called stars and constellations, consisting of globular, spherical bodies which are animated by the divine mind and move with marvellous speed, each in its own orbit and cycle. . . .

While I looked more and more intently down at the earth Africanus checked me. 'How long,' he asked, 'do you propose to keep your eyes fastened down there upon that world of yours? Look up, instead, and look round at the sacred region into which you have now entered.

'Strive on,' he replied. 'And rest assured that it is only your body that is mortal; your true self is nothing of the kind. For the man you outwardly appear to be is not yourself at all. Your real self is not that corporeal, palpable shape, but the spirit inside. Understand that you are god. You have a god's capacity of aliveness and sensation and memory and foresight; a god's power to rule and govern and direct the body that is your servant, in the same way as God himself, who reigns over us, directs the entire universe. And this rule exercised by eternal God is mirrored in the dominance of your frail body by your immortal soul. - Cicero, The Dream of Scipio

God in Texas

2009-04-02T20:21:00.003-05:00

I remember walking down the road toward the cotton fields in Abbot when I was six or seven years old, and finding a piece of quartz. I didn't know it was a mineral. I thought it was a rock, a curious shiny purple stone. The more I looked at it in the morning sunlight, the deeper I saw the shapes and colors and intricate intensity in the quartz. It felt very warm in my hand. I glanced down at the ground and saw tiny bits of rock shining up at me from the dirt, and I had a flash of illumination. This piece of quartz was not a separate thing from the shiny bits, or from anything else. Everything was one thing held together by some power.

In school and in church they tried to knock this awareness out of me by teaching other ways of viewing the world, but I never lost it entirely. . . .

I recently saw an interview with one of the hostages who had escaped his kidnappers in Lebanon after a few months of being blindfolded and chained alone in a room. He told the interviewer that during the first week of confinement, he started talking to himself. Then suddenly he realized he wasn't talking only to himself - he was talking to God. "It's true," he said. "I can talk to God, and it's real. Those guys in the Old Testament who said they talked to God, they really did it. I never believed any of this stuff before. I thought anybody who said they talked to God was crazy. But in that room I found out I was talking to God, and God was answering me through my intuition - not a Charlton Heston voice booming through the roof. God was talking to me through my inner being. You can talk to God, too. Try it, you can do it."

The interviewer switched the subject, clearly a little nervous, but you could tell from the look on the ex-hostage's face that he was a changed person. It had taken an extreme circumstance to get his full attention, but when he began to hear his inner voice responding to his cries and his anger, he learned to talk to God.

You can learn to do it.

Sit on top of a mountain in the Hill Country at sunset, looking off at the mountains and ridges poking up as far as you can see to the west, and pretty soon your inner self begins to see the smoke signals put up by the ancient Indians on the distant ridges, one after the other, and you will reach an inner peace that becomes a conversation with God. This is called meditation, and it is a much easier way to reach God than being handcuffed in a bare room in Beirut. But you don't need either a peaceful, meditative situation or a hostile, threatening situation to talk to God. I talk to God all the time.

-Willie Nelson

Big Enough to Be Inconsistent

2009-03-23T22:59:00.003-05:00

I could take this for my motto. Such is the praise lavished by W.E.B. DuBois on Abraham Lincoln (and Again, Lincoln). I find the remark to be a great compliment perhaps because I strive to be a big man, accommodating and generous and full of contradictions. The pun works in my case as well as Lincoln's because of sheer size and, I like to think, because of character and personality. Not that I fancy myself being president, even if my colleague Dr. Pfau always says I have the gravitas and dignitas required.

The point is DuBois': We should be careful not to paint humanity or particular humans as all good or all evil. I have always been struck by Lincoln's gnosticism. I've always admired his Second Inaugural. What troubles me lately is Lincoln's willingness to dissemble, to foster inconsistent understanding of himself in the eyes of others. Was he racist? Did he maintain white supremacy because he believed it or merely to get elected in Illinois? "Must a government, of necessity," Lincoln asked, "be too strong for the liberties of its own people, or too weak to maintain its own existence?" That he wanted to hold the union together is true, but that singular goal does not mean he was never inconsistent about slavery, race, war, &c. As George Frederickson writes in his book, Big Enough to be Inconsistent: Abraham Lincoln Confronts Slavery and Race:

Before 1864, he had been a cautious, somewhat reluctant emancipator - certainly no advocate of an immediate, uncompensated emancipation without a link to colonization, which was the abolitionist's dream. But the fulfillment of that dream was what he ended up presiding over. Lincoln was thus able to realize his longstanding hope of extinguishing slavery and thereby earned and deserved the title of Great Emancipator.
But a troubling question remains. Did Lincoln, as some historians have contended, go beyond abolition without colonization to endorse civil and political eqaulity for blacks? . . . . [Such] is a question that is difficult to resolve because of the paucity of evidence directly bearing on it and because of the fact that Lincoln's thinking about race may have been in flux at the time of his assassination.

Some things remain a mystery. Some people are big enough to be inconsistent.

Turning the Other

2009-03-23T22:26:00.003-05:00

Protecting the country's security is "a tough, mean, dirty, nasty business. These are evil people. And we're not going to win this fight by turning the other cheek." - Dick Cheney

H.J. Massingham's The Tree of Life was originally published in England in 1943. Its central argument revolves around a profound dual loss: the loss of the love of the land for its own sake and the loss of the Christian religion. For Massingham, the two go hand in hand. There is a distinct paradox at the heart of the Anglo-Saxon experience, for they are they who have written the greatest poems in praise of nature and have done the most destruction to the face of the earth. Massingham reckons this was partially the result of a failure to appreciate the centrality of nature to Christianity, the fundamental unity of heaven and earth. The culmination of that failure is war, including the Second World War.

From the later Middle Ages to the present day the history of Western Europe has been that of the intensification of war, first religious and then economic wars, until the whold fabric has come to the point, unless some drastic rehabilitation takes place, of total collapse as the consequence of total war.

Now, the total collapse of western civilization has been predicted many times. It may yet be upon us and may yet come from total war. One important question to ask ourselves repeatedly is where do we stand on war. I am the first to acknowledge the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate violence, but I long for a world where those distinctions are unnecessary.

It seems reasonable to me that the laws which govern individuals should govern nations. J. Reuben Clark, a prominent attorney and religious leader, thought along the same lines. In an interesting article on Clark's Isolationism in the journal Dialogue I discovered that Clark, like Cicero, considered treaties absolute. For Clark, the 19C efforts to "lessen the evils of war, and especially to relieve noncombatants . . . from the ravages of war" were one of the most significant developments of public policy. There is no justification for the wholesale bombing of cities, destruction of property, and the indiscriminate killing of women and children. The world, Clark wrote, had "gone back a half millennium in its conduct of international relations in time of war. . . . no nation has to bear a greater blame for this than our own." He called the use of atomic weapons on Japan "shameful," and declared that "we are now living under the law of the jungle where in cataclysms every beast fights to the death of his own life."

Clark opposed military establishments and standing armies, advocating instead moral force. "We must have a world organization for the purpose of deliberation, but not for the purpose of waging wars and imposing sanctions," he wrote. Given a world where power politics will fail, Clark recommended the U.S. role be two-fold:

1. To foster international communication, including trade and commerce, while shunning political involvement.
2. To support the cause of peace by working for the settlement of international disputes by mediation and arbitration.

The enemy of human freedom is war; the friend of human freedom is peace. In addition to this two-fold mission, America and the world's hope, for Clark, was in learning and practicing "the divine principles of the Sermon on the Mount. There is no other way." The only way to govern is by good will, not physical force. "We have lost, at least for the moment, the temper to live at peace with our brethren of the world, our fellow children of God."

Perhaps nations and individuals, myself included, could try turning the other cheek. It isn't easy, but it is compelling.

There's a Hole in my Bucket

2009-02-09T21:53:00.002-06:00

Liza and everyone else is wondering, should we or should we not bail out? The current stimulus of 800+ billion dollars is being offered up as a way out of severe economic trouble brought on by what is often referred to as the housing crisis. Americans borrowed too much against their homes and banks encouraged them and encouraged themselves by inventing new and ingenious ways to finance that debt. And governments encouraged banks by keeping interest rates low and by looking the other way as the banks went on inventing. Other people (Great Britain among them) saw the obvious potential for short-term gain and decided to follow suit with borrowing and slick financing tools. (President Sarkozy of France is saying that the cause of the crisis is those confounded Anglo-Saxons. That strikes me as a rather archaic description of the problem. He shouldn't forget that he's smarting because France wasn't as prepared for a downturn as it well might have been. Having said that, of course, they're on much better footing than Iceland.) Slowly but surely the realization came that houses would not continue appreciating forever and that most American families, after years of slow wage increases, could not afford to service all the debt they carried. They were going to have to start saving sooner or later - and now they've done it. Trouble is, our lifestyle (economy) was almost entirely based on consumer spending.

Anyone who has ever examined personal finance with the least degree of effort knows that the debt one carries must always be a function of how much they make. The standard view is that one's debt to income ratio should hover between 30-50%. That means, if a citizen makes a hundred dollars they should commit only $30-$50 of it toward debt leaving the balance to live on. The reason why there is a range is obvious. It should be on the low end if, for example, you don't own a home. If you're servicing debt on a home, but also living in it than it's possible that the range can tilt somewhat higher. If debt service exceeds 40% than you'll begin to see that your debt service is crimping your lifestyle. If you know you're going to get a big raise you might start spending more, which is rational but not always the best idea. 50% is dangerous, but it's not a hole that can't be escaped. The thing to remember is that there is a limit to how much you can borrow and it's always a function of how much you make.

Now, it was Aristotle who said long ago that only oligarchists will accept an oligarchy; as goes personal finances so goes state finances. Sooner or later, the people will mimic the state and/or the state will mimic the people. We have had a state that has for a long time been spending more than it makes. Its debt commitments have long been running at about 60% of Gross Domestic Product - the nation's potential income. This is a fairly low debt-income ratio as many modern nations go: Germany's is 80%; As long as the economy is expanding, the government can go on borrowing more and that percentage may or may not grow larger. In other words, an increase in GDP is like an individual getting a raise. If I am committing fifty dollars a month to service my debt, but I get a raise to $125, I can increase my debt by 20%, but decrease my debt to income ratio by a few percentage points. For many years the state's debt has grown, but so has its income. The theoretical advantage the state (and corporations) have over individuals is that their life-time is longer. They don't get old and retire. They go on in perpetuity - at least theoretically. (We haven't time now to discuss the theories of body politic in Hobbes, Rousseau, Constant, &c.)

In addition to long life-spans, governments are different in yet another way. They're different because the size of the public fund is so large that public spending recirculates throughout the whole, potentially increasing the GDP. Yes, in layman's terms, government spending is one of the ways the government can give itself a raise. The IMF estimates that when rich countries spend public funds on large bailouts like the one now in Congress they can recoup up to 50% of that money in other ways. For example, the University of Minnesota is in a budget cruch because predictions are there will be less money to spend. One of the ways the University is thinking to make up this shortfall is by laying off professors and/or getting a piece of bailout money. Mine is one of the jobs they might "save" by this process. Now, if they get bailout money to actually save my job or one like mine - that means that someone can go on servicing their debt and spending money - all of which the state taxes. It means one less person on unemployment benefits. It means, in short, that the GDP doesn't not grow - especially when you multiply it across thousands of people - which is a good thing when it is obvious that, speaking economically, the US economy is looking at at least one-two years of little to no expansion.

Now, just like personal finances, nations can experience crises. If you or someone you love gets sick you may have to spend down your savings. Often and often people borrow money to pay for hospital bills, &c. Often and often people get better or die, the crisis diminishes, and the debt gets serviced. Nations have the same options. During World War II, for example, the US debt to GDP ratio rose to a staggering 120%; Britain's to an outrageous 200%! (See this great article on the subject in this week's Economist.)

In other words, the bailout is borrowing in a crisis. It potentially stops the whole system from free-falling. Bush's $700 billion hand-out to his banker cronies roughed out to about 7% of GDP. The $800 billion+ plan in Congress now is about 8% of GDP. So the US has, since Thanksgiving, shot off 15% of GDP. The conventional thinking is that about half of that can be recouped economically to the US treasury by, now, a strong dollar and a stemming of the tide of economic restriction. Trouble is, the conventional wisdom also says that banking crises like this - experienced in the 1990s in Japan and South Korea and later a bailout of banks in Sweden - usually cost about 22-29% of GDP to get out of. Having said that, Sweden recouped about 90% of their public outlay - in part because they nationalized their banks - making the profit from those banks the public's for many years to come. (Why, oh why, is the CEO of Citigroup getting any salary at all?)

Of course it's true that even with Japan's bailout they had 10 years of slow to no economic growth (1990s). We don't know what boat they would be in had they not bailed out. Additionally, the Japanese state response was very slow. Plus, their debt to income ratio was much higher than the USA's at the start of their crisis. The US also has advantages. For example, Japan's slow population growth and their stringent immigration policies mean that there was good reason to doubt their capacity to service their debt. The US is still one of the least populous places on earth and could receive many new laborers. But we're still in for some lean years to come, make no mistake. The seven lean kine are coming to devour the seven fat kine.

Having said all that no politician worth anything should want to do nothing. Inaction is not smart. The state's borrowing will not change the fact that we're in for lean times; it might, just might get us through it quicker. We'll have to wait and see. In the mean time, start bailing and hope against hope there's no hole in the bucket.

TJ

2009-02-05T22:39:00.005-06:00

I only just discovered the other day that in Thomas Jefferson's original draft of the Declaration of Independence he wrote,

We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable; That all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

It was Benjamin Franklin who crossed out "sacred and undeniable" with heavy backslashes and inserted "self-evident." It seems to me there is a lot at stake in the change. I am increasingly persuaded that the root of social order is sacred order. I have been transported recently by Philip Rieff's powerful book, My Life Among the Deathworks: Illustrations of the Aesthetics of Authority, volume one of a three part series entitled Social Order/Sacred Order.

Too often in contemporary times we hear sacred and we run for our First Amendment establishment clause. Apparently Jefferson, the author of Virginia's statute for religious freedom, didn't see the contradiction. I don't either. Part of the problem arises from our tendency to argue that the opposite of sacred is secular. That is, of course, incorrect. Secular can and does mean opposed to the church, but denotes a measurement of time, originally time away from a monastery. Secular means the things of the world and the measurement of time. Sacred, as opposed to profane, refers to people and things set apart, of which there are too few these days. Reverence and "thou shalt not" is the rhetoric of sacred. Culture, Rieff says, is renunciation; whereas, our culture looks too much like the renunciation of renunciation. Holy and accursed are the two sides of the same coin. Often and often the scourge and the sanction restore us to human limits.

And, anyway, even if you're not buying that . . . are the rights really self-evident? I'm having trouble buying that. After all, if they are, why the need for Jefferson's eloquent, rhetorical work?

Lord Bacon and the Will to Know

2009-01-10T17:38:00.003-06:00

Do you believe in things you do not understand? Do you believe in these things because it's easier than finding a way to understand? Are you bothered by your lack of understanding?

Those not bothered by their lack of understanding have very little in common with Francis Bacon. Lord Bacon (I always call him that in the spirit of Lord Vader) knew there were things he didn't understand. He thought there was a way to understand them, a method for discovering the true laws of the universe. Ruthless in his pursuit of power, Lord Bacon was ruthless, too, in his pursuit of knowledge. On the one hand, he acted as prosecutor against his former friend, winning the death penalty; on the other, he recommended that one way to advance our understanding of physiology would be to dissect live animals. Alexander Pope characterized Bacon as "the wisest, brightest, meanest of mankind." For his ruthlessness in the pursuit of power we may deplore him. For his ruthlessness in pursuit of knowledge we may admire him even if we would not emulate him. With Bacon, however, we cannot separate the one pursuit from the other.

Reading Bacon underscores his greatness of intellect and the power of the aphorism. One of Bacon's aphorisms that brought together his two loves is found in the opening of his Novum Organum: "Human power and human knowledge meet in one." Meditate on it. Knowledge is power is an aphorism we bandy about with great nonchalance, but it is dangerous idea. Bacon goes on, "for where the cause is not known the effect cannot be produced. Nature to be commanded must be obeyed; and that which in contemplation is as the cause is in operation as the rule." That last bit is rendered better for us by Jonathan Bennett: "The only way to command nature is to obey it; and something that functions as the cause in thinking about a process functions as the rule in the process itself."

In other words, the way we think determines what we discover and what we know. I know this is true, even if I am more or less weak in applying it in my own life. It is a rather terrible idea. That said, perhaps my aspirations are lower than Bacon's. Most days I would not command nature. The impulse, however, is truer and mightier than I would like to admit. After all, getting out of bed in the morning is to command nature and I believe in the power of the intellect to change the universe.

Thankfully Bacon did not rest only on aphorisms, for he is master of the essay, perhaps even the greatest essayist of the English speaking peoples. I re-read a number of these essays recently thanks to my friend Andrew. He is a high school student here in Duluth and had to present an essay in class. He asked me for recommendations and I sent him to Bacon. Personally, I wish scholarly essays today were this interesting and this short. Thirty pages is too tedious for me. And observe how crisp his prose is, from the first sentences of a few essays:

Of Death: Men fear death, as children fear to go in the dark; and as that natural fear in children is increased with tales, so is the other.

Of Discourse: Some in their discourse desire rather commendation of wit, in being able to hold all arguments, than of judgment, in discerning what is true; as if it were praise to know what might be said, and not what should be thought.

Of Riches: I cannot call riches better than the baggage of virtue.

The essay that did the most for me on this reading was Bacon's essay "Of Atheism," wherein he writes, "It is true, that a little philosophy inclineth man's mind to atheism; but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion." He goes on, "They that deny God destroy man's nobility; for certainly man is of kin to the beasts by his body; and if he be not of kin to God by his spirit, he is a base and ignoble creature." Base and ignoble indeed.

Now, read Bacon.

Minnesota "Holiday" Parties

2008-12-19T23:48:00.003-06:00

I went to Sarah's first grade Holiday Party at school this week. I rather like the way Minnesota does things. I remember going to holiday parties in Texas and the whole attitude was rather militant. Maybe it was me, but they always seemed too intent on brandishing their Christianity in the public square. Whereas, in Minnesota they're very nice about it. I mean, here they sing Christmas songs unabashedly in school - which is fine by me. But they also sang Hanukkah and Kwanzaa songs, which they certainly never did in College Station - and which is also fine by me.

I was talking to a friend of mine who just moved here from Salt Lake City. He said there they are awfully preoccupied with making sure that no religious influence mingles with the state schools to the point of it hampering the spirit of the season and, indeed, calling into all question the very sense of a holiday. It's not that there's some overwhelming feeling of political correctness in Duluth. It's just a kind of maturity that this is how things are going to be so we're going to make it easy on everyone. I rather like that. I also like that people here vote for Lizard People and Al Frankenstin[e].

" . . . It's what you do that defines you."

2008-12-19T22:20:00.004-06:00

I've had some good conversations with people over the last few weeks about what they want to do with their lives. I chatted with a former student, Vlady, who is thinking of becoming a soldier and going to Iraq. I had dinner with the missionaries this week - Kathy was eating at a Christmas party that night. Both Elders said they wanted to be surgeons. (How's that for imagination?) Actually, one of them said he loved history and wanted to study history and then be a doctor - for the money. The other said his grandfather owned a ranch in Wyoming and his favorite thing in the world was to go up there and work outside every day. So I concluded that what we had here was a historian and a rancher. I've also, in their turn, been talking to my younger siblings on the same themes. Anyway, the conversations were exclusively with people in their twenties. Indeed, I remember that decade as the decade of worry about what to do with my life. The worry hasn't exactly left me and I'm not in much of a position in my own career to be giving "career" advice, but then again I'm not sure I've any readers so . . .

A few things must be said, of course. No one can choose for you what to do with your life. I've always thought the money motive was fairly crass. All money can do is make your life easier and that's only true to a certain point and for certain people. I've known plenty of people with great piles of money who were still worried they didn't have enough; I've seen others with next to nothing as content as the day is long. The other funny thing is that I'm not convinced that once you choose a career that there is that great of a disparity in what you make compared to others that has much relevance. There are always compensations - as of course there is no correlation, direct anyway, between how much you make and how happy you are or how good your life is.

I recalled this quote from Wendell Berry's essay, "Quantity & Form" in his brilliant book, The Way of Ignorance:

What is or what should be the goal of our life and work? This is a fearful question and it ought to be fearfully answered. Probably it should not be answered for anybody in particular by anybody else in particular. But the ancient norm or ideal seems to have been a life in which you perceived your calling, faithfully followed it, and did your work with satisfaction; married, made a home, and raised a family; associated generously with neighbors; ate and drank with pleasure the produce of your local landscape; grew old seeing yourself replaced by your children or younger neighbors, but continuing in old age to be useful; and finally died a good or a holy death surrounded by loved ones.

I like the thought of one's life and work as a calling. I also like to think of a calling as part of a landscape of life choices that cohere in a vision of larger meaning and purpose.

There are a lot of people who feel some need to apologize for their career choices or who backpedal about the real contribution of their work to the collective good. I think that's mostly sad. I've always thought that car mechanics or computer technicians or what have you make as serious and real a contribution to the commonweal as teachers or doctors. I think this quote from John Ruskin illustrates that point rather well:

Five great intellectual professions, relating to daily necessities of life, have hitherto existed – three exist necessarily in every civilized nation:
The Soldier’s profession is to defend it.

The Pastor’s [and I would put Professor’s] to teach it.

The Physician’s to keep it in health.

The Lawyer’s to enforce justice in it.

The Merchant’s to provide for it.

And the duty of all these men is, on due occasion, to die for it.

‘On due occasion,’ namely: -

The Soldier, rather than leave his post in battle.

The Physician, rather than leave his post in plague.

The Pastor, rather than teach falsehood.

The Lawyer, rather than countenance Injustice.

The Merchant – what is his due occasion of death?

It is the main question for the merchant, as for all of us. For, truly, the man who does not know when to die, does not know how to live.

Ruskin puts a dramatic spin on it, but I think the notion of what to do with one's life is tied up in the notion of when and how one will die - as in the Berry quote above. Every career or profession - well, perhaps I overreach, most serious-minded careers have some larger obligation to the common good, perhaps even a time to die in your post, if its aim is at the best.

It's probably easier than most of us realize to be a sell-out. In this clip from the film A Man for All Seasons, Richard has been waiting all night to beg Sir Thomas More for a position. Richard doesn't much care for More's offer of a post as he's already, as you can see, sold himself out to the highest bidder. He's grateful that More's given him an expensive gift all the while missing the more valuable advice:

This exchange, for obvious reasons, inspires me. I hope you can be inspired by the purpose and sentiment behind the advice. A calling is about being true to who you are together with a mature appreciation of your own strengths and weaknesses. A man should go where he won't be tempted.

Memory and Reminiscence

2008-11-27T14:31:00.002-06:00

My mind has been on other places lately, and I've been traveling more than usual.

My friend Rosa posted this video the other day at the Blogora. It made me think of Wyoming, which I haven't done for a long, long time. It's a strange thing, the memory. After all, here's a song I've never heard before reminding me of a place I haven't thought about in awhile. That prompted me to read Aristotle's essay On Memory and Reminiscence. The only thing I remember from the sage is his claim that some people have a good memory and others have a good recollection, but that you rarely find the same person with both. That made me think of my brother John, who has a good memory. I think I lean a little more toward recollection. The claim seemed to make sense to me by analogy to fast and slow twitch muscles - some people are sprinters and some people aren't., &c. Anyway, I think the song is beautiful and worth sharing.

Last weekend I was in San Diego. When I left Duluth the lakes were freezing over, snow was coming, and they were flooding the ice rinks. When I got off the plane in San Diego it was 80* and gorgeous. Out the front door of the SD airport I smelled a bush that my grandfather had in his Northern California back yard . . . maybe a camilia or gardenia, not sure. I was transported. Yes, transported to California!

This recent trip to California was one of the best. I was there for an academic conference, but I also made it to In'n'Out twice for a double-double animal style. I even made it to the beach. Everyday I drove to the conference with the sunroof open. It was California living! I love California. I've been visiting family there all my life and I'll be sad when it shakes off and falls into the Pacific. Just kidding, but I do love it.

The day after I got home from Cali we jumped in the car and drove to Denver for Thanksgiving. It's something, going half-way across the country and back again and then going half-way again within a few days. I go nowhere for months at a time and then I'm everywhere. Anyway, it's good to be back in Colorado. In a few days we'll be pushing on - up to Wyoming to visit some of Kathy's family and then back to the frozen Northland.

I'm thankful today for places to go - in my head and around the world.

A Race to Change

2008-11-07T20:07:00.004-06:00

This week has been very exciting. I'm glad the presidential election is now over, finally, after two years. I'm also glad Barack Obama won. I think he'll do a fine job; he certainly ran the better campaign, which is obvious to say now. Many of the reasons I voted for him were stated by Jacob Javits in 1958, long before the election - although I didn't read them until Wednesday:

What manner of man will this be, this possible Negro Presidential candidate of 2000? Undoubtedly, he will be well-educated. He will be well-traveled and have a keen grasp of his country's role in the world and its relationships. He will be a dedicated internationalist with working comprehension of the intricacies of foreign aid, technical assistance and reciprocal trade. …
As you can see, Javits was off on his prediction by eight years, but he got some other things right. The quotation is from a great article by Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., who is always worth reading.

In a strange twist of fate I rec'd in the mail this week the latest issue of BYU Studies. In this issue is an article by Edward L. Kimball, Spencer W. Kimball's son. The article is about a revelation received by President Spencer W. Kimball in 1978 that extended the Mormon Priesthood to all worthy men in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The policy for not ordaining men with African blood probably began as an expedient for dealing with the slavery question when the church lived in Missouri in the 1830s. There is evidence that Joseph Smith ordained some men with African blood to the priesthood and invited one woman, Jane Elizabeth Manning James, to be sealed to he and Emma as a daughter.

Anyway, I had somehow forgotten that this is the thirty year anniversary of Kimball's revelation. The article describes in great detail the long and agonizing process that led to the revelation, including President Kimball's frequent visits to the temple to seek guidance from the Lord. President Kimball had many worries on his mind during the process leading up to the revelation, including whether he was doing God's will, how members would react to the news, and the fact that he had been taught from the time he was a child that the priesthood could not go to those of African blood.

One of my favorite parts of the article is President Marion G. Romney's comment on the revelation. He said, in part, "If the decision had been left to me, I would have felt that we've always had that poilcy and we would stick to it no matter what the opposition. I resisted change in my feelings, but I came to accept it slowly. I have now changed my position 180 degrees." If you'd like to read a copy for yourself, send me an email and I'll send you a copy.

Anyway, I also finished a great book this week, History of the French Revolution, by Jules Michelet. The work is a romantic account of the people's fight for change in France up to the night when they storm Versailles to capture the king. The king, it seems, was oblivious to the change going on around him, unaware that his failure to meet the people's needs would cost him his life.

The theme that ties all this together is change. Big change. Sometimes it comes to vindicate the past. Sometimes it comes after long and diligent searching, pondering, and praying. Sometimes it comes as a violent revolution. Whether we work for it, long for it, or fight for it, it sometimes comes when we least expect it. Change always seems right around the corner. As Paul said, "Behold, I show you a mystery; we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed . . ."

Herd Mentality

2008-10-14T21:46:00.007-05:00

Perhaps another night I will post on why I decided to study communication in college, but for tonight I want to reflect a moment on why I didn't study business. I actually had an interesting professor of business, Brooks Mitchell, at the University of Wyoming. The thing I never liked about students of business was the fact that they all seemed to be part of a herd. They seemed to rarely think for themselves and could never speak for themselves; no, instead we had the dreaded group presentation.

Anyway, it strikes me that the recent turmoil in the markets is yet further evidence of this herd mentality, coupled with some pretty serious greed and hubris. Anyway, I was reading Walter Bagehot's Physics and Politics this week. Bagehot was a founding editor of The Economist, the best weekly news mag, and the paper still has a weekly column named in his honor. Anyway, the book's argument is about the relation of physics and politics, a strikingly apt relationship now that the atom has come apart (as Jacques Barzun observes in his illuminating introduction). Along the way Bagehot has this to say about financial markets and the herds that run them:

The mere presentation of an idea, unless we are careful about it, or unless there is within some unusual resistance, makes us believe it; and this is why the belief of others adds to our belief so quickly, for no ideas seem so very clear as those inculcated on us from every side.

The grave part of mankind are quite as liable to these imitated beliefs as the most frivolous part. The belief of the money-market, which is mainly composed of grave people, is as imitative as any belief. You will find one day everyone enterprising, enthusiastic, vigorous, eager to buy, and eager to order; in a week or so you will find almost the whole society depressed, anxious, and wanting to sell. If you examine the reasons for the activity, or for the inactivity, or for the change, you will hardly be able to trace them all, and as far as you can trace them, they are of little force. In fact, these opinions were not formed by reason, but by mimicry. Something happened that looked a little good, on which eager sanguine men talked loudly, and common people caught their tone. A little while afterwards, and when people were tired of talking this, something also happened looking a little bad, on which the dismal, anxious people began, and all the rest followed their words. And in both cases an avowed dissentient is set down as "crotchety." "If you want," said Swift, "to gain the reputation of a sensible man, you should be of the opinion of the person with whom for the time being you are conversing." There is much quiet intellectual persecution among "reasonable" men; a cautious person hesitates before he tells them anything new, for if he gets a name for such things he will be called "flighty," and in times of decision he will not be attended to.

What seems to have happened, on probable evidence, is that banks won't lend to one another. It's a classic prisoner's dilemna, because all they know is their own balance sheet. They figure, if I'm in trouble, they're in trouble, therefore I won't lend to them. Of course, soon they won't lend to me. Soon, the whole herd is running from lending. So what do we do? We decide to loosen up the lending with a $700 billion metamucil package (and, I hate to tell you, but it will be at least double that before things are moving again), all the while no one is asking why it is we have an "economy" that runs on debt or a government that won't do more to blame and punish those responsible?

University of Wisconsin @ Madison

2008-09-30T20:13:00.005-05:00

I had the privilege of attending the 11th Biennial Public Address Conference this past weekend in Madison, Wisconsin. My first impressions of Wisconsin were not positive because all I knew of it was Superio r, but a few days in Madison and I have thoroughly changed my attitude.

It should be noted that Wisconsin is a farm state. On my drive down from Duluth I spent the full 330 miles driving through farmland. Even as one gets closer to Madison one gets the feeling they are very much in cow country. Although I expected this I was surprised, quite frankly, at how much more rural Wisconsin feels than Minnesota. At nearly every highway exit is a very large sign indicating CHEESE for sale. (Comparatively, "Food and Gas" get textual short shrift in the Badger State.) I was lucky enough to be caravanning on the way down with my colleagues Elizabeth Nelson and David Beard (together with his lovely wife, Kate). We stopped at a Noodle Co. for some lunch, and my tomato bisque was superb.

The first night was an interesting lecture on liberalism and John F. Kennedy. The responses focused on how there are probably many different versions of liberalism around and that Dwight Eisenhower was a proponent of liberalism. (Most people don't realize that Reagan was America's first "conservative" president - even Richard Nixon ran as a "liberal." George W. Bush may be the last.) Anywho, after a learned evening we repaired to Dotty Dumpling's Dowry where I had the best cheeseburger of my life, together with some delicious cheese curds and french fries.

My two favorite presentations of the conference were on Friday. Angela Ray gave a great talk on the feminine style. Her argument, if I understand it, was that the concept needs revisiting in light of the fact that essentialism drives our discussions of the feminine - gender, of course, exists on a continuum. (How could you get man without woman?) Stephen Browne responded by pointing out how "style" and "feminine" are both problems to undersand in their own right. Afterwards, Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, a scholar who made her career by writing about the feminine style said she thought we should do away with the term. Indeed, there was universal consensus in the room that we needed to know more about masculinity and gender generally.

Friday afternoon Jim Aune gave a great presentation on American religion. His paper was an analysis of the little known Treaty of Tripoli, signed by President John Adams on 26 May 1797. The peace treaty over the Barbary pirates has an article stating that "the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion." This is really the first instance in American law, so far as I know, that says as much and signed, to boot, by a very Christian president. In any event, there are many who would say that America is a Christian nation, while there are many who would say it is not. (To give one a sense of how complicated the question is, I read recently that 25% of "Christians" in the USA believe in reincarnation.) Anyway, the words of the treaty are clear. Aune is definitely among those who worries about church/state separation. After the speech, there was a lively exchange between Aune and Marty Medhurst about this point. Medhurst has said elsewhere that the separation of church and state is not the same thing as the separation of religion and politics, while Aune is worried about the way religion gets used for votes and power.

On Friday night we convened to watch the Presidential debates. It was fun to watch them with a crowd, even though things were not quite as rowdy as I'd have liked.

On Saturday morning I spent some time tooling around Madison. It is a very cool college town. Madison is located on an isthmus between Lakes Mendota and Menona. Much of campus, including the student union overlooks Lake Mendota. It was a beautiful morning reading on the shore and watching sailboats. The facilities at UW-Madison are exceedingly fine. On my drive home that afternoon I couldn't help reflecting on how rich we are as a people and how amazing it is that farmers gave us all this opportunity.

Experience

2008-09-17T21:54:00.003-05:00

People have been talking a lot about experience lately, and talking as if it was possible and useful to compare the experience of one person to the experience of another. Francis Bacon, one of the more successful politicians the world has known, thought that when it came to kings, rulers, and magistrates, experience wasn't the right question.

And senators or counsellors likewise, which be learned, do proceed upon more safe and substantial principles, than counsellors which are only men of experience: the one sort keeping dangers afar off, whereas the other discover them not till they come near hand, and then trust to the agility of their wit to ward or avoid them.

The passage has some serious implications for our time. Apropos, I think, as a description of the last seven years of American politics. Anyway, what was particularly interesting to me was that Bacon believed learning more important than experience held even more true in times of war. And, indeed, he is very persuasive when he draws upon the examples of Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, two men renowned for their learning and eloquence (as well as their generalship). Admiring Alexander the Great is one thing, Bacon says, but considering him as Aristotle's scholar carries me away! The quotation is from Book I of Bacon's The Advancement of Learning.

le bon David

2008-09-09T23:44:00.008-05:00

I recently read David Hume's Essays Moral, Political, and Literary. Hume is a liberal and manly writer, by which I mean he is a generous and spirited, good humored writer. I'm oft times disappointed in my countrymen who abuse the term "liberal," by signifyin' opprobrium with every use of it. Hume is a British liberal, which is to say he's for personal liberty in speech and thought, markets, and religion. Hume was an atheist, too. (One of the things I'm most interested in is the interplay between religion and politics/political theory. Starting with Hume is a hint that more will come on these themes.)

All of that said, I think I have a great deal in common with him. In addition to our names, he was by all accounts an easy-going, affable sort of dude, down to earth, and a practical reasoner. He enjoyed writing philosophy and playing pool. The French called him le bon David, by which they meant, Good times, Dave. My two favorite things that Hume said are these: "Philosophize, but amidst all your philosophy, be a man!" Also, when he was asked why he didn't write a seventh volume to his masterful History of England, Hume replied, "Because I'm old, I'm fat, I'm lazy, and I'm rich."

Here are some quotes from the essays I adore:

Essay IX: "the heart of man is made to reconcile contradictions"

Essay XVIII:
"When we reflect on the shortness and uncertainty of life, how despicable seem all our pursuits of happiness? And even, if we would extend our concern beyond our own life, how frivolous appear our most enlarged and most generous projects: when we consider the incessant changes and revolutions in human affairs, by which laws and learning, books and governments are hurried away by time, as by a rapid stream, and are lost in the immense ocean of matter?"

And from the same essay, some questions to tranquilize and soften the passions:

1. Is it not certain, that every condition has concealed ills? Then why envy anybody?
2. Every one has known ills; and there is a compensation throughout. Why not be contented with the present?
3. Custom deadens the sense both of the good and the ill, and levels everything.
4. Health and humour all. The rest be of little consequence, except these be affected.
5. How many other good things have I? Then why be vexed for one ill?
6. How many are happy in the condition of which I complain? How many envy me?
7. Every good must be paid for: Fortune by labour, favour by flattery. Would I keep the price, yet have the commodity?
12. I desire fame. Let this occur: If I act well, I shall have the esteem of all my acquaintance. And what is all the rest to me?

In Essay XXI: "Of National Characters" Hume argues that character is not touched by the climate of a place. I'm totally unpersuaded by this line. I think people in Minnesota are quite different from Texans, and partly, at least, because they live in winter chill over half the year as opposed to oppressive humidity year-round. The national character of Minnesota is very different from that of Texas, of this I'm certain. I think it has something to do with climate, where Hume doesn't.

Soldiers, Hume says, are lavish, generous, and brave. Their idleness together with the large societies they form in camps and garrisons, inclines them to pleasure and gallantry. "Being employed against a public and an open enemy, they become candid, honest, and undesigning: And as they use more the labour of the body than that of the mind, they are commonly thoughtless and ignorant."

Part II, Essay I: Of Commerce:
"A too great disproportion among the citizens weakens any state. Every person, if possible, ought to enjoy the fruits of his labour, in a full possession of all the necessaries, and many of the conveniencies of life. No one can doubt, but such an equality is most suitable to human nature, and diminishes much less from the happiness of the rich than it adds to that of the poor. It also augments the power of the state, and makes any extraordinary taxes or impositions be paid with more cheerfulness. Where the riches are engrossed by a few, these must contribute very largely to the supplying of the public necessities. But when the riches are dispersed among multitudes, the burthen feels light on every shoulder, and the taxes make not a very sensible difference on any one's way of living.
"Add to this, that, where the riches are in few hands, these must enjoy all the power, and will readily conspire to lay the whole burthen on the poor, and oppress them still farther, to the discouragement of all industry." Emphasis Original.

[Interestingly, Hume thought industry would be generated by the poor, even though today I always here that taxes need to be low on the rich for the same reason. Something's changed.]

Part II, Essay XI:
" . . . One extreme produces another. In the same manner as excessive severity in the laws is apt to beget great relaxation in their execution; so their excessive lenity naturally produces cruelty and barbarity. It is dangerous to force us, in any case, to pass their sacred boundaries."

"The humour of blaming the present, and admiring the past, is strongly rooted in human nature, and has an influence even on persons endued with the profoundest judgment and most extensive learning."

Part II, Essay XV: [Some good advice to remember during the build-up to our election in November]:
"It belongs, therefore, to a philosopher alone, who is of neither party, to put all the circumstances in the scale, and assign to each of them its proper poise and influence. Such a one will readily, at first, acknowledge that all political questions are infinitely complicated, and that there scarcely ever occurs, in any deliberation, a choice which is either purely good or purely ill. Consequences, mixed and varied, may be foreseen to flow from every measure: And many consequences, unforeseen, do always, in fact, result from every one. Hesitation, and reserve, and suspence, are, therefore, the only sentiments he brings to this essay or trial. Or if he indulges any passion, it is that of derision against the ignorant multitude, who are always clamorous and dogmatical, even in the nicest questions, of which, from want of temper, perhaps still more than of understanding, they are altogether unfit judges."

Finally, on history, Hume writes:

"The advantages found in history seem to be of three kinds, as it amuses the fancy, as it improves the understanding, and as it strengthens virtue."

As mentioned, I found myself disagreeing with Hume a few times. I do not agree with his essay on suicide, that we have a right to such action. And I do not agree with his thoughts on the immortality of the soul, that the soul is mortal. He is, nevertheless, a clear and engaging writer.

2008-07-09T00:10:00.000-05:00

I am beloved manliness and I sprang from dark but handsome waters and a Christian pearl.